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The Bethel Village Trails are a perfect morning meander. Just a short pedal from the main grounds of The Bethel Resort & Suites, the routes loop and flow, as easy cruisers with golf course views give way to more challenging terrain. The trails wind through the Community Forest, part of a 3,500-acre collection of conserved lands not far from Bethel’s Main Street—time it right, and you can coast back into the village for a coffee and fresh pastry at Gemini Café & Bakery. Then you’re back in the saddle to explore an entirely different set of trails on the other side of town. 

If there is a New England community that better blends town and country than Bethel, you’d be hard-pressed to find it. Neighboring the White Mountain National Forest and framed by the peaks of western Maine, this community of about 2,500 has long held a special place in the hearts of outdoors enthusiasts as well as anyone seeking a dose of classic small-town Maine.

“The village is this picture of close-knit living, with plenty of places to go for walks and great views,” says Gabe Perkins, a fifth-generation resident and executive director of the nonprofit Inland Woods + Trails. “And then you venture out just a little bit, and you’re immediately into the rural landscape and pastoral farmland. There’s nothing like it.”

Generations of travelers have agreed. City folks made Bethel their summer retreat when trains from Portland and Montreal began stopping here in the mid-1800s; later, the nearby ski resorts Sunday River and Mount Abram built up the town’s winter cred. All the while, hikers and paddlers have been flocking to the region’s peaks and waterways. 

More recently, Bethel’s kitchens have been catching up to its mountains. While downtown looks much as it always has, the menus behind the storefronts have quietly turned ambitious. A food trailer not long ago, Le Mu Eats now works out of a permanent space, lacing Southeast Asian flavors into American comfort food. Watershed Wood-Fired Kitchen turns out blistered pizzas and house-made pasta in a snug, one-story clapboard building off Main Street. And after buying and restoring an 1890s barn that formerly housed a dive bar, the owners of Modern Barn are serving up thick steaks and pouring from a wine list twice honored by Wine Spectator—serious enough to draw attention well beyond Oxford County.

Bethel’s cultural offerings are keeping pace, too, with artist studios and galleries dotted across town, and an indie theater, The Gem, emblazoned with the state’s largest outdoor mural. The real showstopper is the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum, which launched in late 2019 with a collection that even big cities would envy. Among its treasures: the world’s most extensive display of lunar and Martian meteorites, five of the largest pieces of the moon, and a 158-carat gem cut from the Rose of Maine, the biggest morganite crystal discovered in the U.S. 

Yet at its core, Bethel remains an adventure town. The Appalachian Trail runs through this region, which includes what is arguably the AT’s hardest mile. There’s paddling and rafting on the Androscoggin River, and within Bethel’s borders you’ll find some of the most challenging mountain biking terrain in the state. As Perkins sees it, “This has always been an outdoors place, but now it’s a year-round outdoors place.”  

Whether you’re hiking through wild and lovely nature or sitting down to a dinner that wouldn’t be out of place in Portland, the Bethel experience is as varied as its landscape. Mountains on one side, a Main Street you can walk end-to-end on the other, and not much distance between the two. The only hard part here is leaving. —Ian Aldrich

Discovery Destinations

Discover four more Maine small towns with outsize appeal.

Lubec: Perched at the end of an 11-mile peninsula in far DownEast Maine, the easternmost town in the contiguous U.S. packs a lot into its small footprint: a dramatic coastline, a vibrant arts and culture scene, and one of the nation’s most identifiable lighthouses, the candy-cane-striped West Quoddy Head Light. 

Greenville: Moosehead is the state’s largest lake, and this town, at its southern tip, is its gateway. A year-round adventure hub—fishing and boating in the summer; snowmobiling and ice fishing in the winter—Greenville is the woods-and-waters escape that has long defined Maine’s inland experience.

Hallowell: Founded more than 250 years ago on the Kennebec River just south of Augusta, Maine’s second-smallest city (pop. 2,600) looks very much as it did when it was the region’s commercial hub. The well-preserved 19th-century downtown is a National Historic District, and its streets are lined with galleries, independent shops, and old-school antiques stores. 

Stonington: Maine’s busiest lobster port still very much moves to the rhythms of its working harbor on the rocky outermost point of Deer Isle. The pretty waterfront village is dotted with restaurants and galleries, while the renovated opera house is a popular stage for live performances.

Learn more at VisitMaine.com.

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