Vermont’s Island Line Trail | The Bike Ride That Has It All

The magic of exploring a place on two wheels instead of four comes into full focus on Vermont’s Island Line Trail, a bike ride that’s a lesson in the art of going slow. Sure, you could cover this relatively flat, relatively easy distance in a couple of hours, but why? This is a journey made for meandering and stopping. And then stopping again. The views, after all, include both Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, not to mention sailboats, lighthouses, and killer sunsets. And the sights are as varied as the terrain. You’re in a city. You’re on a paved path. You’re on an island. You’re on…the water? In a sense, yes.

Stretching from Burlington and along four miles of the city’s waterfront, Vermont’s Island Line Trail is made up in part by the Burlington Bike Path and the Allen Point Access Trail. But the stop-in-your-tracks photo op comes on the Colchester Causeway, a three-mile path flanked by huge marble boulders that extends into Lake Champlain, the largest lake east of the Great Lakes and the sixth-largest freshwater body in the country.

Some riders have described the causeway experience as gliding atop the water. You’re certainly crossing it, and come summer you can catch a lift to the final stretch of the trail, on the island of South Hero, via a seasonal ferry operated by the Burlington bike nonprofit Local Motion. As on the other Champlain islands, biking on South Hero isn’t merely a tolerated activity—it’s part of the culture. Signs for the Lake Champlain Bikeways, a 1,600-mile network that runs through Quebec and New York, are everywhere you look (as are patient drivers, even on busy main roads). If you’ve got the pedal power, you can muscle your way back to Burlington for proper adult refueling and some stunning end-of-day colors over New York’s Adirondacks.

For a map and ferry information, go to localmotion.org.