Roll out from the Oxbow Park trailhead on Portland Street this month and you will notice something missing. No orange detour arrow. No handwritten sign taped to a fence post pointing you around a washout. For three straight summers, riders leaving Morrisville learned to check the state's trail map before clipping in, because the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail was, in some stretch or another, torn open by water. This year the map has nothing to report. That is not a small thing. It is the first time since the trail's last segment was finished that the whole 93 miles has been open at once, end to end, with no active flood repair standing between you and wherever you meant to go.
Most locals still ride like the closures are coming. That habit made sense for three years. It does not make sense anymore, at least not for the stretch that runs through town.
Three Summers of Checking the Map First
The trail's last piece was completed in March 2023. Four months later, on July 10, 2023, a flood tore through the corridor and closed every state rail trail in Vermont at once, washing out sections, dropping trees across the path, and taking out bridges. The Burlington Free Press put the damage at roughly $11 million. The governor's planned end-to-end ride, scheduled for that same July with Senator Bernie Sanders meeting him at the midpoint in Morrisville, got postponed.
What followed was not one repair season but three. More flooding hit in 2024. Sectional closures carried into 2025 while crews kept working. If you biked out of Morrisville in any of those years, you got used to riding with a mental asterisk: the trail exists, but check first.
What "Whole" Actually Means This Year
The corridor is genuinely hard to keep intact. It holds 525 culverts and 53 bridges across its length, and 36 of its 93 miles run directly alongside the Lamoille River, built low and close the way old rail lines were. One of those culverts alone cost $6.2 million to replace and took three years to get funded, partly because the federal disaster money got caught in a Trump-era Department of Homeland Security policy that added extra scrutiny to FEMA requests over $100,000. That policy has since been rescinded, and the money came through this spring.
That backstory matters because it explains why "the trail is open" hasn't been true in a simple sense since 2023. This summer it is. As of mid-August, the state's own trail alert map showed no closed segments anywhere along the route, according to reporting from Compass Vermont. That is a different claim than "the trail is nice," which has been true for years. This is "the trail is finished being interrupted," which has not.
Where That Leaves a Ride Out of Morrisville
The practical question for someone who lives here is simpler: what does a ride out of town actually look like now that the asterisk is gone.
| Direction from Morrisville | Distance | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| West toward Cambridge Junction | About 17 miles one way | Flat grade, open farmland and river views, roughly 275 feet of elevation change over 18 miles |
| East toward Wolcott and beyond | Longer, connecting toward Hardwick and St. Johnsbury | More wooded, follows the Lamoille River, historically the section most affected by prior flood damage |
The only closure the state currently flags on its trail updates page sits near West Danville, a long-term detour of about two-thirds of a mile around a damaged crossing. West Danville is more than an hour's drive east of Morrisville, on the far side of the corridor near St. Johnsbury. It has nothing to do with the stretch you would ride from Oxbow Park. The state's caution language on that page reads as standing boilerplate, warning that segments "may be closed" during construction season. It is worth reading past that line to the actual list, because the actual list is short and it is not here.
The Stops That Make the Ride Worth Repeating
Part of why locals keep riding this stretch, flood years or not, is that Morrisville's downtown section puts you within easy reach of places worth stopping for. A co-owner of one of them put it plainly in a piece for Rails to Trails Conservancy:
"Scenic is an understatement for the trail."
That was Allen Van Anda, co-owner of Lost Nation Brewing, whose building sits right off the trail at 87 Old Creamery Road and is nearly impossible to miss once you smell the barbecue smoke drifting down toward the path in summer. From the Oxbow Park trailhead, a short ride puts you within reach of:
- Lost Nation Brewing, 87 Old Creamery Rd, with a beer garden that backs up almost directly onto the trail
- Two Son's Bakehouse, 246 Main St, for something to refuel with before heading back out
- Ten Bends Beer, 590 East Main St
- Moogs Place Restaurant, 97 Portland St
- Rock Art Brewery, 632 Laporte Rd
- Soulmate Brewing Company, 74 Portland St
Oxbow Park itself has parking, restrooms, and drinking water, which is more than most trailheads along the corridor offer. That combination, a real trailhead plus a walkable cluster of food and drink, is part of why the Morrisville to Cambridge stretch was one of the first two sections of the entire trail that Rails to Trails Conservancy singled out as finished and ready to ride, alongside the St. Johnsbury to West Danville stretch on the opposite end.
The One Line Worth Reading on the State's Website
If you only take one thing from the state's alert system this year, it is this: the generic warning at the top of the page is not a report on current conditions, it is a disclaimer that gets posted every construction season regardless of what is actually happening. The real information is in the specific list below it, and right now that list has one entry, sixty miles from here. For a rider based in Morrisville, that is functionally the same as an all clear.
That distinction is worth carrying into how you think about this stretch of trail going forward. The flood years trained everyone to treat the whole corridor as provisional, something that could close on you without warning. This year the map finally matches what riding it actually feels like. It took three construction seasons, a $6.2 million culvert, and a federal funding policy that had to get rescinded before it could happen, but the trail through town is no longer something you ride with a mental asterisk attached. Worth remembering, the next time you're deciding whether to check your phone before you clip in or just go.
Grant Wieler pays attention to details like this because the small, local facts, which trail is finally clear, which brewery anchors which block, which building people mean when they say "the old creamery," are the same details that shape how a property in Morristown or anywhere else in Lamoille County actually lives day to day. If a move to this area, or within it, is somewhere on your horizon, Grant Wieler is a good person to talk to about it. Start Your Stowe Search.
