My first trip to the Green Mountains. I carried Mansfield Park up Mount Mansfield in a dress, and then I ate my way back down the Mountain Road.
Last Updated: August 29, 2026
Stowe sits in the northern Green Mountains, about half an hour east of Burlington. Almost everyone comes up Interstate 89 to Waterbury and then follows Route 100 north into the valley, with Mount Mansfield filling the windshield the whole last stretch. The times below are rough door to door.
Stowe was chartered in 1763 and settled in 1794, and for its first hundred years it was a hill town like every other hill town in northern Vermont, sheep and dairy and timber. The white church with the tall spire at the top of Main Street went up in 1863. It is the Stowe Community Church, one building shared by one congregation, and it is one of the most photographed churches in the country. If you have ever seen a postcard of Vermont, you have probably seen this steeple.
The mountain changed everything. A carriage road was cut to the summit of Mount Mansfield in 1870 to carry guests up to a hotel on the ridge, gone now. In 1933 a Civilian Conservation Corps crew cleared the first ski trails down the mountain, one of the first chairlifts in the country followed in 1940, and Stowe spent the rest of the century calling itself the Ski Capital of the East. It has a fair claim to the title.
Then in 1942 the von Trapp family bought a hilltop farm on the edge of town because the view of the mountains reminded them of the Austria they had left. They were touring the country as the Trapp Family Singers at the time. They opened the house to guests in 1950, the stage musical about their escape opened in 1959, and a great many people have driven up that hill since to stand where Maria stood. The lodge burned in 1980 and was rebuilt in 1983, bigger and more Austrian than before. It is still run by the family, and two of the best things I ate in Stowe are on its grounds.
Mount Mansfield tops out at 4,393 feet, which makes it the highest point in Vermont and the high point of the whole Green Mountain range. Seen from the east it reads as a face lying on its back looking up at the sky, and the parts are named to match. Working from south to north you pass the Forehead, the Nose, the Lips, the Chin, and the Adam's Apple. The Chin is the true summit and the one you want.
There are three ways up. You can drive the Auto Toll Road, 4.5 miles of gravel switchbacks that follow the old 1870 carriage route, open roughly June through the middle of October. You can ride the gondola up the Stowe Mountain Resort side. Or you can walk, on the Long Trail or one of the steeper routes off Route 108. However you reach the top of the toll road or the gondola, it is another 1.3 miles on foot along the open ridge to stand on the Chin, over bare rock the whole way with the ground dropping off on both sides.
I did the ridge walk in a green sundress, because a mountaintop is exactly the sort of place I want to be wearing one and I was not going to talk myself out of it. The wind up there is serious and the footing wants your attention, but the payoff is a view that runs for 50 miles. Burlington and Lake Champlain lie right below you to the west, with the blue wall of the Adirondacks behind them in New York. The White Mountains stand off to the east in New Hampshire. And the Green Mountains run north from your boots toward the Canadian line an hour away, where on a clear enough day people will tell you the pale smudge on the horizon is Quebec.
I brought a book up with me, the way I always do, and the book was Mansfield Park. This was not an accident. Mount Mansfield and Mansfield Park is the kind of coincidence I am powerless against, and I had been saving the hardcover book for the summit for weeks. It is the least loved of the six novels, the one with the heroine nobody wants to be, and I think it is quietly one of her best.
Fanny Price is the poor relation. She is sent as a child to live in a great house that is not hers, she is reminded of that fact constantly, and she spends most of the book being overlooked in corners while louder people make worse and worse decisions. She is also the only person in the story who sees clearly, and by the last chapter everyone who matters has had to admit it. Reading that on a rock at the top of a mountain, alone, in a dress I had been slightly too proud to leave in the car, landed harder than I expected. There is more on the Austen of this near the bottom of the page.
Start the morning at the Kaffeehaus, the little Austrian bakery on the Trapp Family Lodge grounds. It opens at 7 and it does the things an Austrian bakery should do, apfelstrudel and Linzertorte and Sachertorte, alongside very good coffee and a case of glossy modern tarts that would hold their own in a Vienna patisserie. Take it outside to a table on the hill and eat looking at the same view that made the family stop the car in 1942.
I got a domed apricot tart on an almond base with a ring of piped cream, plus a corner of walnut strudel, and I thought about Miss Bates the whole time. In the 2020 film of Emma she breaks off in the middle of a sentence at a dinner to shout "Mother, you must sample the tart" at old deaf Mrs Bates across the table. It is the funniest reading of that character I have seen, and it is exactly the correct instruction. Sample the tart.
Dinner is a short walk downhill at the Bierhall, the brewery restaurant, which pours the von Trapp lagers, including test batches you cannot get anywhere else, and serves the food to go with them. Start with the pretzel. It arrives the size of a dinner plate, dark and blistered and properly chewy, and you order the cheddar lager soup to go with it whether or not you think you want soup. You want the soup.
After that the menu goes where you would expect, bratwurst and schnitzel and a genuinely good steak, but the thing that surprised me was the burger. It comes with a side of mashed potatoes shot through with braised cabbage and caraway, which sounds like too much next to a burger and turns out to be the right call. Heavy, Austrian, exactly what a day on the mountain has set you up for. Sit on the deck if the weather is doing anything at all.
Vermont runs on maple and Stowe is no exception. It turns up in the coffee, on the pancakes, and by the jug at the Stowe Mercantile, and you should lean into all of it. The specific thing to hunt down is the maple creemee. A creemee is Vermont's word for soft serve, and the maple one is made with real syrup churned into the mix, so it comes out the color of weak tea and tastes like a maple candy that melts. It is a genuinely great thing and it costs about four dollars.
You can get one all over town. Stowe Sweets, tucked behind the Country Store on Main Street near the church, scoops a good one, and there are stands up and down the Mountain Road and Route 100 doing the same. If you pass a hand painted sign that says creemee, stop the car.
The Alchemist makes Heady Topper, the hazy double IPA that more or less invented the style and still gets ranked at the top of it. The Waterbury brewery is closed to the public, but the Stowe location on Cottage Club Road has a beer cafe with a lawn, and from Thursday through Sunday they pull Heady Topper from a cask by hand, served soft and a little warmer than the can, in a metal cup, for about five dollars. I have had a lot of Heady Topper. This was the best version of it I have had.
Parked on the same lawn is Warren's Kitchen, which has been the resident food truck here long enough that it is really just the kitchen now. It leans Caribbean and it is very good. The fried chicken sandwich is enormous and comes with a heap of tostones, and there is a hot sauce that earns its keep. You order the beer inside, you order the food outside, you find a patch of grass, and that is the whole afternoon sorted.
Edelweiss is a deli and general store partway up the Mountain Road that has been feeding Stowe for 50 years. It is where you go for the sandwich you eat on a rock or a chairlift, and the sandwich to get is the Montreal pastrami. It is a serious pile of meat, hand cut, on a good roll, with the slaw and the mustard doing exactly what they are supposed to.
I have eaten a lot of pastrami in a lot of places, including the counters in New York that people fly in for, and this one held its own with any of them. I carried it a few minutes down the road and ate it standing next to a covered bridge, which is not a thing the New York counters can offer.
Idletyme sits a little further up the Mountain Road, and I walked in expecting a standard brewpub and walked out planning the next visit. The beer is made on site and it is good, but the food is the story. The Vermont cheddar fritters come out molten inside a craggy fried shell, dusted with something smoky, with a green aioli to dip them in, and I will be thinking about them for a while.
I also had the grilled chicken sandwich, which was excellent, and beside it a small green salad, which matters more than it sounds. The summer of 2026 has been one long parade of leafy green recalls, and I had been avoiding raw lettuce since May on principle. Mr. Woodhouse, who in Emma is convinced that nearly every food is a quiet attempt on your health, would have understood my caution completely, and this year he would have been right. The Idletyme side salad was the first one I had risked in months, and I am pleased to report it went fine.
The headline season is fall. From the last week of September into the first week of October the maples on Mansfield and up through Smugglers Notch turn every color there is, and half the state seems to drive to Stowe to look at them. It is the busiest and the most beautiful the town gets, and it is worth booking a room months ahead for.
Winter is the other high season, roughly late November through March, when the skiing runs and the village does its full snow globe act. Summer, when I came, is the quiet one, green and cool and good for the mountain and the recreation path, with everything open and no line for the creemee. The one stretch to avoid is April, mud season, when the dirt roads go to soup and a lot of the restaurants close to catch their breath.
The bottom line: Stowe earns its reputation. Climb Mansfield to the Chin, eat a tart on the von Trapp hill and a pretzel at the bottom of it, drink the Heady Topper off the cask, and do not leave town without a maple creemee. Come in summer if you want it calm, come in early October if you want the postcard, and either way build the trip around the food. I did, and I have no regrets.
The essentials, at a glance.
The Gold Brook covered bridge, built in 1844 and known to everyone as Emily's Bridge. The story goes that a jilted bride hanged herself in the rafters and never left. A local woman later admitted she invented the whole thing to scare the town's teenagers, which has slowed the ghost tours down not at all.
The cliffs of Smugglers Notch, the narrow pass on Route 108 between Mansfield and Spruce Peak. The road threads between fallen boulders, cars fold their mirrors in to squeeze through, and the whole thing closes with the first real snow. It is named for the goods that moved through here when trade with Canada was banned.
The view south along the spine of the Green Mountains from the ridge on Mansfield. That pale line on the far horizon is Lake Champlain. On the walk out to the Chin you get this on one side and New Hampshire on the other, the whole way.
The obvious thread is the name. I carried Mansfield Park up Mount Mansfield because the two line up, and once I was up there the book fit the place better than a pun has any right to. Mansfield Park is the Austen novel most concerned with being taken away from home and set down somewhere that is not yours. Fanny Price is moved to a grand house as a child and never quite allowed to belong to it. She watches, she waits, she turns out to be right. Stowe has a version of that story built into its most famous address. The von Trapps landed here in 1942 with nothing settled, picked this particular hill because it looked like the Austria they had lost, and made it home by deciding to. Maria, for what it is worth, is another Austen shape, the governess who marries into the household full of children who are not hers and holds the whole thing together anyway.
On my list of Austen settings and their Northeast doubles, Mansfield Park itself is matched to the Berkshires, for the grand estate reasons. The second thread up here belongs to a different book. The ridge on Mansfield, all bare rock and wind bent scrub and a view that gives out only at the curve of the earth, reminded me hard of the High Peak in Derbyshire, lifted a few thousand feet. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth heads north with the Gardiners, sulks that they will not reach the Lakes, settles for Derbyshire, and it is on that trip, with the country opening around her, that she is standing on exactly the right ground when Pemberley comes into view and she starts to understand what she has been refusing. Austen almost never stops for scenery. When she does, it is usually because someone is about to change their mind. A long view from a high rock is good for that.
There is not much else of Vermont on the site yet, though more is on the way. The nearest cousin is Lenox and the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, about two hours south, the other New England mountain region that fills up all summer for the music and the scenery and empties out by November. Further west, the Catskills in New York are the plainer, closer version of the same idea, 90 minutes of hills and faded resort towns within reach of the city.
This is a habit of mine. In Maine, Bar Harbor and Acadia put you on a bare granite summit over the ocean where the sunrise arrives before it reaches anywhere else in the country. In Massachusetts, Concord sits ten minutes from Walden Pond, where the entire point was sitting outside with your thoughts and something to write on.
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Subscribe to the Newsletter →Stowe is about 185 miles from Boston and takes roughly 3 hours and 15 minutes to drive, mostly on Interstate 93 and Interstate 89. There is no train directly to Stowe, but Amtrak's Vermonter stops at the Waterbury station about 20 minutes away, once a day in each direction.
There are three ways up Mount Mansfield. You can drive the Auto Toll Road, a 4.5 mile gravel road open to cars from about June through the middle of October for a fee. You can ride the gondola from Stowe Mountain Resort. Or you can hike, on the Long Trail or a steeper route from Route 108. From the top of the toll road or the gondola it is another 1.3 miles on foot along the ridge to the Chin, the true summit.
Mount Mansfield is 4,393 feet at its highest point, the Chin, which makes it the tallest mountain in Vermont and the high point of the Green Mountains. The ridgeline is named for a face seen in profile, with the Forehead, Nose, Lips, Chin, and Adam's Apple running from south to north.
The Alchemist's beer cafe on Cottage Club Road in Stowe pours cask Heady Topper by the glass, hand pulled, from Thursday through Sunday. It is the only Alchemist location open to the public, since the Waterbury brewery is closed to visitors, and a food truck called Warren's Kitchen is parked on the lawn.
Late September into early October is the peak, when the fall foliage on Mount Mansfield and through Smugglers Notch is at its brightest and the town is at its busiest. Ski season runs from about late November through March. Summer is greener and much quieter. April is mud season and many restaurants close.
For most visits, yes. The village around Main Street is walkable and the 5.3 mile Stowe Recreation Path links it to the Mountain Road on foot or by bike, but the restaurants, the Trapp Family Lodge, and the mountain trailheads are spread along several miles of road with no public transit between them.
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