South-Eastern Vermont Fire Roads? Any locals?

[SnoViking]

So around the 4th of July I'm taking the family up to Townshend State Park in Vermont. I was looking to see if anyone new of any nice dirt road loops around southern Vermont and within the Green Mountains? I'm not looking for anything technical or rocky or rough. Just a nice scenec trail we can take the 4Runner on. I was up in the area a few years back and remember seeing a lot of fire roads, unfortunately I was in an Audi at the time. Any help would be much appreciated. I can only gage so much via online. I think word-of-mouth might be better for this.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Hyde802]

Pick up one of these,

Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer Delorme, David (EDT) : ISBN 29498 - Rakuten.com Shopping

They list all the "fire roads". We call them Class IV roads. A lot of them got washed our and closed when Irene came through a few years ago. The books can be had at most gas stations.

Im not from that area, so I cant recommend any first hand.

 

[SnoViking]

Good call on the atlas. I actually found a used one via eBay which was a local guy. Picked it up for $10 this morning.

I did stumble upon a route called the "Puppy Dog Route" which is from Mass to Canada and I can take a portion of it into the state park where we're staying. I have about 40 miles on class IV unpaved roads leading into the park. Im pumped.

 

[Hyde802]

Nice good luck! Well be looking forward to some pictures!

 

[SnoViking]

Finally got back and unpacked!

We had a great time driving around southern Vermont. Apparently finding dirt roads in vermont isnt that hard. Haha. Pretty much if it isnt a state highway, there's a good chance some of it isnt paved.

The Delorme atlas was killer. We couldnt have gone half the places we did without it. We enjoyed the fact that we could take a more direct route on back roads then driving around things on major highways. We usually didnt have cell service and beside some of the roads not being labeled or having street signs, we found our way around. We ended up doing about 500 miles of random driving and Id say about 250-300 of those miles were dirt roads. We just cruised around 25-35 mph and enjoyed the scenery and vistas.

We started out on the "puppy dog route" which is a route made up of mostly dirt roads from Greenfield Mass and leads up to the Quebec border (it was put together by the local BMW motorcycle club). We did the first 50 miles on the route and besides making two small errors had a smooth trip. I highly recommend the route to anyone in the area or anyone who wants a nice scenic road trip.






















.

 

[BigNuge]

Nice!

Thats my favorite kind of off roading! Almost zero possibility of breaking something, but still off the beaten (paved) path.

I don't mind it getting a little technical though. Last year on my bird hunting trip I wandered down a dirt road so far it narrowed and became an ATV trail! Didn't know that until it opened up to a parking lot with tons of trucks with ATVs on trailers...people everywhere. There were about 20 of them just sitting on their machines chatting when I crawled out of the woods in the T4R. Their faces were priceless :shocked:

Anyway, I love that sort of stuff...I could cruise like that for days!