I walked into Vermont on June 14th. At this point in my Appalachian Trail thru-hike, I was thriving. I was hiking with a super fun group, moving along the trail very well and feeling great mentally.
Vermud In The Green Tunnel
On June 14th, we woke up at the Williamstown motel to some rain in the morning, and began walking into Vermont. Vermont is known for its muddiness, and, particularly during our first day in the state, I really felt that. Perhaps it was because we walked into Vermont on a rainy day, but there was some serious mud we trampled through.
Upon entering Vermont, we came to the Vermont Long Trail. The LT is a trail that runs the entire length of Vermont from Massachusetts to Canada. The AT runs concurrent with it for 105 miles.
The Vermont Long Trail runs concurrent with the Appalachian Trail.
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It’s a pretty 105 miles, extremely green. I learned why they call Vermont the Green State and why the mountains we were now traversing were called the Green Mountains. When people talk about the AT, one of the big complaints is that it’s a “green tunnel.” In other words, people say that instead of getting lots of great views overlooking landscapes, the heavy greenery blocks your vision and all you see is a green tunnel. I hadn’t really experienced that thus far. I felt like there were plenty of views and I didn’t feel the claustrophobia many people talked about on the AT. Plus, I really enjoyed being surrounded by all that lush greenery.
That was until Vermont. It wasn’t overwhelming, but I definitely felt a little bit of what they were talking about with this green tunnel.
However, there were some breaks from this green tunnel after the first bit of the state. Atop Stratton Mountain, there was a really tall fire tower that had a spectacular view of the Green Mountains around us. The morning after we passed it, Clover and Homesick walked back up into it to watch the sunrise. I wasn’t about to wake up that early for it, but they said it was amazing.
In Vermont, the trail goes through New England’s ski country. That means we hiked over several dry ski mountains like Mount Bromley and Killington Peak (Stratton Mountain was also a ski mountain), which were all really nice and pretty.
I had a really fun hiking group at this point in my hike.
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Around this time, Homesick and Scout had a couple friends who were vacationing nearby and wanted to join them for some miles. They kindly picked us up from the trail to resupply and grab a little treat. Their friends were super cool folks. We got ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s, and then returned to the trail.
Homesick and Scout slowed down a bunch to stay with their friends. It takes a bit to get up to the hiking fitness of a thru-hiker, so they naturally couldn’t do the mileage the rest of us were. That meant Clover and I jumped ahead with plans to reconnect with Homesick and Scout later.
Around the time the AT split off from the LT and veered east towards New Hampshire, a crazy heat wave came. It was brutal, and required us to drink lots of water, use tons of electrolyte mixes and to slow down a bit.
During this time, Clover and I stopped at a shelter where we ran into Pig Pen. Clover had never met Pig Pen at this point, and I had been running into her off-and-on since the Smoky Mountains. Pig Pen was the hiker I’d known the longest that I was still hiking around and Clover was probably the hiker I’d hiked with the most, so it was a cool crossover. Sweet Stuff had gotten off trail for a family vacation, so Pig Pen was now solo hiking.
At that shelter, we also met Star Girl. Star Girl was from Washington, DC, though she had plans to move to Florida to attend graduate school after her hike. She was doing a super long section hike. She started in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia and was playing it by ear on how long she’d go. She’d done a crazy amount of miles already though.
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The next day the four of us all ended up hiking to the Inn at the Long Trail, a cool hotel that caters to hikers and has a fun Irish pub inside it. The pub boasts that it was the first bar in Vermont to serve Guinness.
After we hiked out from the inn, it finally happened. I’d been looking my entire thru-hike. I saw a bear! It was a black bear of course–there are no grizzlies or other bears near the trail–which is safer and it was from a bit of a distance. The second it noticed me, it jumped over a log and scurried away. It was a super cool sight. Black bears are honestly just like big dogs, not really all that scary. At least that was my experience.
The Generosity Of Another Kind Stranger
Soon after all that, I entered New Hampshire, the penultimate state. The trail leading up to the Vermont-New Hampshire border contains what felt like the longest roadwalk of the entire trail. That roadwalk leads over the Connecticut River, at which point you enter Hanover, New Hampshire, which was our introduction into the state. Hanover is a really pretty town. It’s an Ivy League college town, the home of Dartmouth College, a really pretty campus.
An engraving marking the Vermont-New Hampshire line!
I enjoyed a burger and a beer in Hanover near the college, watching university students walk by. It was a super pretty town. Then I met up with a super nice lady named Wren. Wren was a trail angel who I’d been connected with by a lady I met at the Inn at Long Trail. She very kindly welcomed me into her home and allowed me to stay the night in her and her husband Jon’s guest bedroom. They were such nice folks, and they had super interesting stories.
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Wren told me all about her writing. She had written for a number of magazines and newspapers, similar to my profession, so we bonded over that. She was also working on a memoir about her family that sounded super interesting. She’s also a teacher and said she taught at the high school where one of my favorite artists, a folk singer that has really exploded in popularity recently named Noah Kahan, went to high school, which was so crazy to me.
Jon told me about when he was in his twenties, he took what sounds like an amazing trip across the U.S. He hitchhiked and train hopped across the country. It was so much fun to hear his stories. He was also a doctor at a nearby hospital .
The next day, I bade them farewell and walked out of Hanover. Hanover is surrounded by beautiful forests. I reckon if you like the outdoors, Dartmouth College is an awesome place to go to school.
Early on in New Hampshire, I dealt with a really bad storm. It was the toughest storm I’d dealt with since I crossed Roan Mountain in Tennessee. It was a really bad storm. I cut that day short to hole up in a shelter and get out of the rain. On June 23, I spent the night at Hexacuba Shelter, and was preparing myself mentally to enter the White Mountains.
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A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
