A 38-mile loop through Rochester and Pittsfield caught the BBC’s attention. It is the first finished piece of a planned 485-mile route across the state.

by Compass Vermont

Picture two days on a mountain bike in central Vermont. You start in downtown Rochester, stop at the bike shop to check tire pressure, and climb out of town on dirt that turns to steep gravel and then to two rutted tracks through grass.

By afternoon you are deep in the Green Mountain National Forest, nearly 400,000 acres of woods in every direction. Twenty miles in, you reach the Chittenden Brook Hut — simple bunks, a self-service kitchen, no running water.

The next day ends on Tunnel Ridge, five miles of flow trail and roughly 110 switchbacks dropping you back into the valley.

Thirty-eight miles, nearly 6,000 feet of climbing, and two general stores in Pittsfield to restock. You need a mountain bike with real tires and suspension, your own food and water, and a reservation, because there are two huts on the route and summer weekends go fast.

That is the Heart of the Greens Loop, and in a recent travel feature the BBC told a global travel audience it is the next great American bikepacking trip.

The loop is the first completed multi-day segment of the Velomont Trail — the name joins vélo, French for bicycle, with the Green Mountains. When complete, it would run 485 miles from the Massachusetts line to Canada, stitching together existing mountain bike networks with new trail, 30 backcountry huts and five downtown hostels across 27 communities. Its organizers say it would then be the largest hut-supported trail system in the United States.

It is not yet that familiar to Vermonters. A very large number of other people just heard about it.

The challenges

About 33 miles of 485 are built. Nineteen huts exist statewide, not all on the route.

Last year the Forest Service approved roughly 100 more miles in two decisions, among them the 72 miles Compass covered in September. But approved mileage is not the same as new trail. Of those 72 miles in the Manchester District, Singletracks reported in November, 15 are entirely new construction. Nine are reroutes, 25 are improvements to trail that already exists, 14 use existing trail as it stands, and nine follow Forest Service roads.

With another 30 approved miles in the Rochester District and 10-plus on private land near Randolph, about 150 new miles are slated for construction, bringing the trail to 200 miles. Velomont director Angus McCusker estimated up to ten years to finish it. VMBA executive director Nick Bennette put it at five if the funding comes through.

The ride is also harder than the mileage suggests. The BBC’s writer, Robert Isenberg, who grew up near Rochester, describes grinding up switchbacks, dismounting to push, and reaching the campground after dark.

And the businesses meant to catch the spending are thin on the ground. Isenberg carried several meals with him, because the route touches only two village centers — Rochester, and Pittsfield nine miles south — and services along the trail itself are still developing.

That matters for how the project’s projections should be read. The 2020 economic impact study that public funders relied on projects 16,000 to 36,000 annual visitors and 51 to 91 jobs — and states plainly that those figures assume all 485 miles are built, 30 to 45 huts are open, and five years have passed since completion. A third of the trail exists.

When Vermont Huts director RJ Thompson brought the project to House Agriculture in April 2023, the slide showed $31 million in new spending, $2 million in state taxes and 112 new jobs. A footnote says those are cumulative at Year 15, which works out to an average of about $2 million a year across the period. The slide does not say whether the 112 jobs are ongoing positions or job-years; it lists them beside a separate figure of 2,340 weeks of employment through the hut-construction program. The same testimony counts 48 communities on the route; Vermont Huts and its trail-building partner currently say 27.

The study’s own author, the Burlington firm SE Group, is now listed as a corporate sponsor of Vermont Huts.

What is not in dispute is the scale of public support. Former Senator Patrick Leahy secured $2.5 million in Congressional Directed Spending for Velomont construction, earmarked for federal land — money Bennette notes cannot be spent on private land and carries other conditions. Vermont Huts is a private nonprofit, and its 2024 tax return shows $503,989 in government grants, about 36 percent of its revenue for the year. Some of that went into construction, which the return puts at $207,471; much of the rest was still booked as pledges and grants receivable at year end.

And here is the awkward part. The 2020 study says the payoff will not show up in the trail’s own books — fees are minimal, costs exceed revenues, and the benefit lands in local restaurants and stores instead. Then, on its community impacts page, it declines to project what any individual town would gain, saying the effect “cannot be estimated on a town by town basis.”

So Vermont has a detailed forecast of what the finished trail returns statewide, and no forecast at all of what it returns to Rochester.

The opportunities

The huts themselves are working better than 33 built miles would suggest.

Revenue from hut rentals — the tax return’s own label — went from $20,842 in 2019 to $69,745 in 2024. That is more than triple, and a record.

The most useful thing in the 2020 study is who it expects to show up. Under every scenario, the overwhelming majority are not end-to-enders riding 485 miles; those number 120 to 400 a year. They are day riders going town to town: 12,960 to 25,290 of them, spending just under $80 a day.

Which is why the BBC story is worth more than it looks. Rochester does not need a few hundred purists. It needs ordinary travelers who now know central Vermont exists, ride a piece of it, and buy lunch.

Some of that is already happening. The Stable Inn opened in Rochester in 2023 in a converted 1840s timber-frame warehouse, next door to the bike shop, and has become a place riders bookend the trip. Owner Anni MacKay told the BBC the arrangement is a “complete win-win” for a community providing backcountry access.

And for a small organization, exposure like this is hard to come by. Vermont Huts spent $16,349 on advertising and promotion in all of 2024.

Where we are

Rochester has a grocery store, cafes, a bakery, a bike shop, the farm-to-table Maple Soul and the Stable Inn. Pittsfield has two general stores and the Clear River Inn & Tavern. Those are the businesses positioned to catch whatever arrives next summer.

Three sections of the Rochester District extension are already out for bid, and Velomont hopes to have builders lined up for next year. The trail will not be finished for a long time. What has changed is that it now has an audience it did not have a week ago.

CHECK IT YOURSELF
The planned route and the towns along it: vermonthuts.org/the-velomont. Hut availability and rates: vermonthuts.org — Chittenden Brook is open year-round, the Spikehorn Yurt only from mid-May to mid-October, and neither has running water. Vermont Huts asks Spikehorn guests to bring their own drinking water; the backup rain barrel must be filtered, treated or boiled. The route guide and designated overnight parking areas: ridgelineoutdoorcollective.org. Rochester has limited bus service, so most riders drive to the trailhead.