Vermont: A State of Unparalleled Autumn Beauty | Travel Video

There's a sound that doesn't exist in much of America anymore. The sound of almost nothing. Just wind moving through sugar maples. And somewhere off in the distance, a cowbell. No traffic underneath it. No sirens cutting through. This is Vermont. Tucked into the spine of the Green Mountains, where entire valleys still seem to run on their own clock. Spend a little time here, and you start noticing something unusual. Not what Vermont has. What it doesn't. The things much of America spent the last century building, expanding, replacing, and speeding up. Somewhere along the way, Vermont started asking a different question. What's actually worth keeping? And after 200 years of answering that question, the result is one of the most familiar places in America, and one of the least understood. So what exactly have the rest of us been missing? Vermont is small. Genuinely small. The sixth smallest state in the country, with fewer people than most mid-sized American cities. Just over 600,000 in total. You could fit the entire population into a single decent-sized stadium, with room left over for the marching band. But size in Vermont doesn't mean what it means everywhere else. Drive across it, and you'll cross mountains, river valleys, dense forest, and farmland that's been worked by the same families for generations. Sometimes all in the same afternoon. The Green Mountains run down the spine of the state like a backbone, and everything else in Vermont arranges itself around that spine, the way towns and rivers in Switzerland arrange themselves around the Alps. It's not a comparison Vermont asks for. It's just what happens when mountains come first, and people figure out the rest. The seasons here aren't a backdrop. They're closer to a rhythm the whole state moves to. Winters are long, white, and unapologetic. Spring arrives reluctantly, and mostly through mud. Summer is short and green, and almost absurdly pretty. And fall, well, fall is the reason half the cameras in New England point this direction every year. What ties all of it together is a kind of stubbornness that Vermonters wear pretty comfortably. While a lot of the country was busy industrializing, franchising, and supersizing, Vermont quietly opted out. Not as a protest, exactly. More like a shrug. A sense that bigger isn't automatically better, and that some things, once you scale them up, just stop being themselves. That same instinct shows up at the table. Vermont takes food seriously, in an unfussy, almost old-fashioned way. Cheese is still made by hand, in small batches, by people who will tell you exactly which herd it came from. Maple syrup isn't a topping here. It's closer to a local currency. And the food, like everything else in the state, tends to come from somewhere you could actually point to on a map. Put it all together, and you get a place that's strangely hard to categorize. Not rural in the way people usually mean it. Not quaint, exactly. Either. Just a state that decided, a long time ago, what it wanted to be, and never really felt the need to update that decision. Which is a good place to start, because almost everything Vermont is famous for begins right here, in the mountains. Stowe. There's a church steeple in the middle of Stowe that's been photographed so many times, it's almost become shorthand. For Vermont. For New England. For a certain kind of American postcard that people didn't realize still existed somewhere. The Stowe Community Church sits at the center of town, white against the green of Mount Mansfield behind it. And it looks today almost exactly the way it looked in photographs from decades ago. Someone, somewhere along the line, decided that was worth holding on to, and kept doing it. But here's where Stowe gets interesting. Because that steeple sits in a town that also feels, in places, like it wandered in from somewhere in the Swiss Alps. That's not an accident. Back in the 1940s, a family by the name of Von Trapp, yes, that Von Trapp family, settled here after leaving Austria and brought with them an instinct for mountain life that fit Stowe almost too well. Chalet-style architecture started showing up alongside the clapboard farmhouses. Ski culture took root in a way it hadn't anywhere else in New England. And the result is a town that wears two identities at once, comfortably, like it's been doing it for years. Mount Mansfield rises just outside of town, and we'll get to what makes that mountain special in a bit. For now, it's enough to say Stowe grew up in its shadow, and the town still moves at the pace that shadow sets. Through all of it, the town stayed small on purpose. No big-box stores, no chain hotels lining the main road, just a tight cluster of family-run shops, bakeries, and creameries, most of them making whatever they're known for in small batches, the old-fashioned way. There's something else, too, something harder to put into words, but easy to feel the moment you arrive. Kids ride bikes down quiet streets without anyone worrying about it. Strangers nod at each other on the sidewalk. Life here runs on a slower clock, small... Mount Mansfield. Right above the town of Stowe rises Mount Mansfield, the highest point in all of Vermont. Locals have a name for it that says more than any elevation marker could, the Sleeping Giant. Seen from a distance, the ridge really does take on the shape of a face, lying back against the sky. There's the forehead, the nose, the Adam's apple, right at the highest point of the whole state, the part that technically counts as Vermont's summit. There's the chin. Stand there, on the literal high point of an entire state, and the name on the map is just... the chin. Somehow that makes the whole thing feel more real, not less. Above a certain elevation, something else happens. The trees just stop. What's left is a stretch of low, wind-bent vegetation that looks more like Labrador or the Arctic than New England. It's alpine tundra, an ecosystem that normally lives thousands of feet higher than this. Here, the wind and cold are harsh enough to fool it into thinking it's much farther north. On a clear day, the summit lays Vermont out below, then keeps going. New Hampshire, New York. On the right day, even Canada, sitting right there on the horizon, as if the mountain forgot where the state line was supposed to be. Getting up there is its own experience. A narrow toll road switches back and forth up the mountainside, climbing through forest until the trees thin out and the views open up on every side. No guardrails to speak of, just gravel, exposure, a drop that gets more serious with every turn. People drive it slowly, not because they have to, but because going any faster feels like missing the point. Winter turns Mansfield into something else entirely. Its steepest runs carry a name that's become legend on the East Coast. The Front Four, terrain steep enough that getting down one of them in one piece counts as its own small victory. Come summer and fall, the mountain shifts again. Trails climb through forest, break out onto bare rock. That same road becomes a different kind of challenge for hikers, for cyclists, for anyone willing to earn the view on foot. At the end of the day, when the light turns low and gold, people climb up here just to watch it happen, to stand on the chin of a sleeping giant, feel impossibly small for a moment, and realize that's the whole point of coming up here in the first place. Woodstock. If Stowe is a poem written by the mountains, Woodstock reads more like a history book, one that somehow never stopped being lived in. People have called it the most beautiful small town in America so often that the title's practically stuck to the welcome sign. Walk into the center of it, though, and you'll understand why. There's a stillness here that doesn't feel like decline. It feels like the 19th century just never fully left. The first thing you notice might be what's missing. No power lines crossing overhead, no utility poles cluttering the view. The town buried all of that decades ago just to keep the skyline clean. It's the kind of decision that probably seemed excessive at the time. Now it looks like genius. The buildings around the green are mostly federal and Georgian, brick facades, white trim, a style that hasn't changed in two centuries because nobody ever saw a reason to change it. Up in one of the church towers hangs a bell cast by Paul Revere's foundry. It still rings. Nobody seems to think that's particularly remarkable here, which might be the most Woodstock thing about it. The green itself sits at the center of everything. The way a town square is supposed to work but rarely still does, a shared space the whole town quietly organizes itself around. Just outside town, a pair of covered bridges still carry traffic across the Atakweche River the way they have for over a century. They weren't built for charm. Covering a bridge protected the wooden trusses from the weather. And it worked well enough that some of these structures have outlasted bridges built generations later out of steel. Up the hill from the village sits Marsh Billings Rockefeller, the first piece of land in the country set aside specifically because of how it had been farmed and forested, not despite it. Next door, Billings Farm still works the land the way it would have a century ago, with the kind of patience that doesn't show up on a quarterly report. And in the hills above town is where, in the 1930s, someone rigged up a rope in an old Model T engine to pull skiers uphill. The first rope tow in the country. It wasn't much, but it was enough to start something that eventually, towns like Stowe would build entire economies around. Mostly, though, Woodstock rewards people willing to just walk down Central Street past the green, over one of the bridges and back, at a pace slow enough that you start noticing things. Which, around here, tends to be the whole idea. Green Mountain National Forest. Vermont looks like it's always been this green. From the air, ridge after ridge of unbroken forest stretches across the state. The kind of view that makes it easy to assume nothing here has ever changed. It has, though. Walk far enough into the Green Mountain National Forest, and you start finding things that don't belong in a forest. A low stone wall running straight through the trees for no apparent reason. A square depression in the ground, lined with old fieldstone, the outline of a cellar from a house that hasn't stood in well over a century. This forest wasn't always a forest. 200 years ago, much of Vermont had been cleared for farms and sheep pasture, more open land than the state has today. Then the farms failed, or people simply left for easier ground out west, and the forest did what forests do. It came back. Half a million acres of it now, mostly granite underneath, mostly green on top, with the old walls and cellar holes still sitting out there as a kind of fine print. Proof that wild here doesn't mean untouched. It means returned. Two of the most storied long-distance trails in the country pass through this reclaimed land. The Appalachian Trail runs north to south on its way from Georgia to Maine. The Long Trail, older than the Appalachian Trail, and the inspiration for it, runs the length of Vermont alone. For a stretch, the two trails share the same dirt before splitting off toward very different destinations. Most of what makes this forest worth the trip doesn't show up from the road. You have to go looking for it. Waterfalls tucked into side ravines with swimming holes underneath them cold enough to make you forget it's summer for a second. Black bear, moose, and bobcat move through here, mostly unseen on their own schedule. Animals that wouldn't have had much room a couple of centuries ago back when this was open farmland. And then there's fall. The same hardwoods that quietly took this land back one decade at a time do something almost theatrical every October. Sugar maple, birch, and beech lighting up in red, orange, and gold all at once, covering ridge after ridge for as far as you can see. It's the kind of place where the wild isn't the opposite of human history here. It's what came after it. Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain doesn't behave like a lake is supposed to. It behaves like a sea that got boxed in by land. It runs for over 100 miles, long enough that the far shore disappears into haze on a clear day, with sandy beaches and water so clear you can watch your own shadow on the bottom. For a few weeks every summer, this is as close to a coastline as landlocked New England gets. And like any sea, it has a history of being fought over, sailed across, and lost to. For thousands of years before Vermont was Vermont, this water was a highway, native peoples, then French and British forces battling for control of the continent, then steamboats hauling lumber and goods to market. Almost everything that moved through this region eventually moved across this water, and some of it never made it across. Sailing ships, steamboats, canal boats, dozens of vessels went down over the centuries, and the lake's cold, low oxygen water did something unusual. It stopped them from rotting. Divers who go down today don't find wreckage so much as time capsules. Hulls still standing upright, deck fittings still in place, as if the boats just sank straight down and decided to wait there. Go back far enough and the lake's bedrock holds something even stranger. Fossilized reef structures, among the oldest on earth, laid down when this entire region sat at the bottom of a tropical sea long before anything resembling a lake or a mountain or Vermont existed at all. In a way, the lake remembers being an ocean. It's just had a few hundred million years to forget the details. And somewhere in all that water, people say lives Champ, a creature with sighting reports going back further than most of the towns around the lake. Nobody here builds their identity around it, exactly, but mention the name on a boat at dusk, and you'll notice more people watching the water than admitting to it. Today, all of that, the battles, the wrecks, the legend, the ancient seabed, sits under a surface that looks almost recreational. Sailboats cut across open water. Anglers chase bass in tournaments that pull competitors from across the northeast. Towns along the shore fill their patios by evening, pouring beer from breweries that take the job about as seriously as Vermont takes anything. To the north, the lake splits around a string of islands that feel like they belong to a different state entirely. Flat, open, full of working farms, with water on every side. A converted rail causeway carries a bike path straight out into the lake, water pressing in on both sides for miles. Stand out there, on a strip of road no wider than a sidewalk, with a hundred miles to see on either side, and the whole story comes back into focus. Champlain was never really a lake to begin with. It's an ocean that ended up landlocked and forgot to start acting like one. Burlington. How does a city with fewer than 50,000 people end up shaping how the rest of the country sees an entire state? Burlington sits along the eastern shore of the lake we just left behind. Small on a map, but somehow not small in any way that matters. Spend an afternoon downtown, and small city starts to feel like the wrong description entirely. Start with the basics. A few years back, Burlington became the first city in the country to run entirely on renewable electricity. Wind, hydro, solar, biomass, all of it adding up to 100%. Nobody throws a parade about it. It's treated less like an achievement and more like a thing that simply got handled the way you'd expect from a place that's been quietly doing its own thing for a while. That same attitude runs straight down Church Street, the pedestrian heart of downtown. Four blocks, no cars, and conspicuously no chain stores anywhere along it. Used bookstores, vintage clothing racks, coffee roasted a few blocks away by someone whose name you'll probably learn if you stick around long enough. On a summer evening, a street musician sets up on one corner, a juggler somewhere else, and somewhere down the block a beer festival is probably happening, because in Vermont that's less an event than a season. And this is, depending on how you count it, a place that's launched its share of names you'd actually recognize. Bands that started in basements around here went on to fill arenas. A couple of guys who couldn't afford much more than milk, sugar, and a converted gas station ended up building an ice cream company that's now a household name. Burlington has a habit of producing things that get very big, very far from here, while staying itself exactly the size it wants to be. Part of that comes from the University of Vermont, which sits on a hill overlooking the whole city and keeps the average age downtown noticeably younger than you'd expect from a place this size. Students fill the cafes, the record shops, the late night diners, and the energy that comes with a college town never quite leaves, even years after most people graduate and stay anyway. You can spend a full day here without touching a wallet much past coffee and lunch. Wandering Church Street, ducking into shops just to look, listening to whoever's playing on the corner. Then, toward evening, everyone seems to drift the same direction, down toward Waterfront Park, where the whole town turns to face the lake and watches the sun go down behind the Adirondacks across the water. There's a particular kind of ease to Burlington, the sense of a place where people feel comfortable being exactly who they are without much explanation required. It's not loud about it. It's just there, in how unbothered everyone seems, in how normal it is to be a little unusual. And maybe that's the answer to the question we started with. Burlington didn't end up shaping how people see Vermont on purpose. It just kept being itself, and the rest of the country happened to notice. We opened with a sound, wind, a cowbell, and a kind of silence that's gotten hard to find anywhere in America. Turns out, that silence had a lot to say. It told us about a mountain shaped like a sleeping giant, and a town that buried its own power lines just to protect a view. About a forest that spent two centuries quietly taking back what it once lost, and a lake that still isn't entirely convinced it isn't the ocean. About a small city that somehow exported half of what people think they know about this state, without ever needing to brag about it. Put it all together, and a pattern starts to show up. This isn't a state that got left behind. It's a state that, somewhere along the way, stopped racing, and discovered it didn't actually want to start again. That's a strange kind of luxury in this day and age. Most places don't get the choice. Vermont made one anyway, and then kept making it for 200 years straight. So if you're sitting there thinking you've never really heard of half of this, that's kind of the whole point. Vermont was never hiding, it just never asked to be found. If you've made it this far, there's a good chance places like this are exactly your kind of thing. If so, the like button helps more than you'd think, and subscribing means you won't miss the next one. And if there's another state out there you've been curious about, one you think you already know, but maybe don't, let us know. That might be exactly where we go next. Mount Mansfield. Right above the town of Stowe rises Mount Mansfield, the highest point in all of Vermont. Locals have a name for it that says more than any elevation marker could. The Sleeping Giant. Seen from a distance, the ridge really does take on the shape of a face, lying back against the sky. There's the forehead, the nose, the Adam's apple, right at the highest point of the whole state, the part that technically counts as Vermont's summit. There's the chin. Stand there, on the literal high point of an entire state, and the name on the map is just the chin. Somehow that makes the whole thing feel more real, not less. Above a certain elevation, something else happens. The trees just stop. What's left is a stretch of low, wind-bent vegetation that looks more like Labrador or the Arctic than New England. It's alpine tundra, an ecosystem that normally lives thousands of feet higher than this. Here, the wind and cold are harsh enough to fool it into thinking it's much farther north. On a clear day, the summit lays Vermont out below, then keeps going. New Hampshire, New York. On the right day, even Canada, sitting right there on the horizon, as if the mountain forgot where the state line was supposed to be. Getting up there is its own experience. A narrow toll road switches back and forth up the mountainside, climbing through forest until the trees thin out, and the views open up on every side. No wind, no guardrails to speak of, just gravel, exposure, a drop that gets more serious with every turn. People drive it slowly, not because they have to, but because going any faster feels like missing the point. Winter turns Mansfield into something else entirely. Its steepest runs carry a name that's become legend on the East Coast, the Front Four. Terrain steep enough that getting down one of them in one piece counts as its own small victory. Come summer and fall, the mountain shifts again. Trails climb through forest, break out onto bare rock. That same road becomes a different kind of challenge for hikers, for cyclists, for anyone willing to earn the view on foot. At the end of the day, when the light turns low and gold, people climb up here just to watch it happen. To stand on the chin of a sleeping giant, feel impossibly small for a moment, and realize that's the whole point of coming up here in the first place. Woodstock. If Stowe is a poem written by the mountains, Woodstock reads more like a history book, one that somehow never stopped being lived in. People have called it the most beautiful small town in America so often that the title's practically stuck to the welcome sign. Walk into the center of it, though, and you'll understand why. There's a stillness here that doesn't feel like decline. It feels like the 19th century just never fully left. The first thing you notice might be what's missing. No power lines crossing overhead, no utility poles cluttering the view. The town buried all of that decades ago, just to keep the skyline clean. It's the kind of decision that probably seemed excessive at the time. Now it looks like genius. The buildings around the green are mostly federal and Georgian, brick facades, white trim, a style that hasn't changed in two centuries because nobody ever saw a reason to change it. Up in one of the church towers hangs a bell cast by Paul Revere's foundry. It still rings. Nobody seems to think that's particularly remarkable here, which might be the most Woodstock thing about it. The green itself sits at the center of everything. The way a town square is supposed to work, but rarely still does, a shared space the whole town quietly organizes itself around. Just outside town, a pair of covered bridges still carry traffic across the Attaquetchee River the way they have for over a century. They weren't built for charm. Covering a bridge protected the wooden trusses from the weather. And it worked well enough that some of these structures have outlasted bridges built generations later out of steel. Up the hill from the village sits Marsh Billings Rockefeller, the first piece of land in the country set aside specifically because of how it had been farmed and forested, not despite it. Next door, Billings Farm still works the land the way it would have a century ago with the kind of patience that doesn't show up on a quarterly report. And in the hills above town is where, in the 1930s, someone rigged up a rope in an old Model T engine to pull skiers uphill, the first rope tow in the country. It wasn't much, but it was enough to start something that eventually towns like Stowe would build entire economies around. Mostly though, Woodstock rewards people willing to just walk down Central Street, past the green, over one of the bridges and back at a pace slow enough that you start noticing things, which around here tends to be the whole idea. Green Mountain National Forest. Vermont looks like it's always been this green. From the air, ridge after ridge of unbroken forest stretches across the state, the kind of view that makes it easy to assume nothing here has ever changed. It has, though. Walk far enough into the Green Mountain National Forest, and you start finding things that don't belong in a forest. A low stone wall, running straight through the trees for no apparent reason. A square depression in the ground, lined with old fieldstone, the outline of a cellar from a house that hasn't stood in well over a century. This forest wasn't always a forest. 200 years ago, much of Vermont had been cleared for farms and sheep pasture, more open land than the state has today. Then the farms failed, or people simply left for easier ground out west, and the forest did what forests do. It came back. Half a million acres of it now, mostly granite underneath, mostly green on top, with the old walls and cellar holes still sitting out there as a kind of fine print, proof that wild here doesn't mean untouched. It means returned. Two of the most storied long distance trails in the country pass through this reclaimed land. The Appalachian Trail runs north to south on its way from Georgia to Maine. The Long Trail, older than the Appalachian Trail, and the inspiration for it, runs the length of Vermont alone. For a stretch, the two trails share the same dirt, before splitting off toward very different destinations. Most of what makes this forest worth the trip doesn't show up from the road. You have to go looking for it. Waterfalls tucked into side ravines with swimming holes underneath them cold enough to make you forget it's summer for a second. Black bear, moose, and bobcat move through here, mostly unseen on their own schedule. Animals that wouldn't have had much room a couple of centuries ago, back when this was open farmland. And then there's fall. The same hard woods that quietly took this land back, one decade at a time, do something almost theatrical every October. Sugar maple, birch, and beech lighting up in red, orange, and gold all at once, covering ridge after ridge for as far as you can see. It's the kind of place where the wild isn't the opposite of human history here. It's what came after it. We opened with a sound, wind, a cowbell, and a kind of silence that's gotten hard to find anywhere in America. Turns out, that silence had a lot to say. It told us about a mountain shaped like a sleeping giant and a town that buried its own power lines just to protect a view. About a forest that spent two centuries quietly taking back what it once lost, and a lake that still isn't entirely convinced it isn't the ocean. About a small city that somehow exported half of what people think they know about this state without ever needing to brag about it. Put it all together, and a pattern starts to show up. This isn't a state that got left behind. It's a state that somewhere along the way stopped racing and discovered it didn't actually want to start again. That's a strange kind of luxury in this day and age. Most places don't get the choice. Vermont made one anyway, and then kept making it for 200 years straight. So if you're sitting there thinking you've never really heard of half of this, that's kind of the whole point. Vermont was never hiding. It just never asked to be found. If you've made it this far, there's a good chance places like this are exactly your kind of thing. If so, the like button helps more than you'd think, and subscribing means you won't miss the next one. And if there's another state out there you've been curious about, one you think you already know, but maybe don't, let us know. That might be exactly where we go next.