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Looking for fall foliage in New England PT2
Finding Vermont Covered Bridges
by Jeff "Foliage" Folger
A bridge in the center of Montgomery Center
The hard to find bridge.
If you see this.. DO NOT TRAVEL ON IT!!! This is for snow mobiles only!!! I know this for a fact.. :-)
The last bridge in Montgomery Center.
Greetings foliage seekers!
Covered bridges in Montgomery Vermont:
Late Sept, I started an exploration of the covered bridges of Montgomery Center Vermont. This town has six bridges still standing and five out of six still functioning. The first thing we did was get out the Delorme map book or Gazetteers as they are also known and planned out a route past all the bridges in Montgomery and then up past Jay peak. Remember I'm including the Latitude and Longitude with each of these bridges and you can go to itouch.com and plug in the coordinates and see a birds eye view? OK... a satellite's eye view of the location I'm blogging about. If you missed the last couple of articles that detailed how to go about using this site and the coordinates then click onGPS travel or covered bridges and you can go back and read over the process. Also then if you decide to go find this covered bridge then you can print out the map and follow the streets in yourself..
Fuller Bridge
+44.54.10 Lat -72.38.22Long
A short 30' bridge that still gets lots of town traffic is right across from the Montgomery Post office. It's at the corner of Black hills rd and North hills rd. It allows you to cross Black Falls Brook and was built in 1890 and restored in 2000.
Creamery Bridge
+44.52.3 Lat -72.38.53Long
If you try to find this one, don't do what we did! The Creamery Bridge is right where the maps say it is but they don't have any road signs for it. First they have two parallel roads off the main road, West Hill rd and Hill West rd. (although Google calls both west Hill rd) It doesn't matter which road you take but if you take the western rd like we did and you miss the Creamery rd like we did be prepared to do some exploring.
The roads south of the bridge are mostly old logging roads and there are a few houses back in there. But if you see a small dotted line and you decide to explore that and you don't have a 4X4 then be prepared to walk out of there. That is a snow mobile track! It's not a road and we were basically bouldering through the back roads of Vermont.
It was quite a detour we took and on the way back north on West Hill rd we found an unmarked road and I made a left on it and at that point my GPS, which will tell you what road you are on told us we were on Creamery rd and we quickly stopped because the road is blocked by two large boulders. We walked down to the bridge (about 75 yds.) and we walked through it and looked at the boulders on the other side. As you may have guessed it's closed to all but foot traffic.
The Hutchens Bridge
+44.51.30N & -72.36.45
To find the Hutchens Bridge you will have to ignore the Delorme book (or map of choice). You want to leave 118 onto South Brook rd. You will go about 50' and the road turns into a dirt road of good quality. You will pass a small pond on the left and the bridge will be down at the bottom of the hill (a Dead end). This bridge was built in 1883 and it crosses the south branch of the Trout River.
This is the last of our exploration for covered bridges in Montgomery Center. There are a ton more of them to visit in Vermont and I'll be hitting a few more in the future.
I would love to hear from you as to whether you like the exploring for covered bridges or not and you can leave a comment here or drop me a note over in the foliage forum.
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