On the Shores of Lake Dunmore, VT [June 23-25, 2018]

Our cousins' camp, so inviting and relaxing

Lake Dunmore is a beautiful, crystal clear lake in Western Vermont with homes and children’s summer camps dotted along its’ shores.  Folks in Vermont who have second homes on a lake call that home a “camp”; we were able to visit our cousins, Nancy and Chip Malcolm, at their charming camp. Lake Dunmore is a naturally formed lake that is also part of a string of lakes in a hydroelectric system.  On our first evening there, we took a boat tour around this pretty lake seeing camps and also the summer camps that look just like those camps in the movies.  During the course of our visit, we spent many happy moments in comfy arm chairs looking at the lake and visiting with our dear and delightful cousins.

Beautiful Lake Dunmore

The morning of our stay was grey, cool and drizzly as we set out to hike up the mountain behind their camp to see Silver Lake.  The trail took us past a rushing stream, huge boulders and tall trees eking out an existence in shallow pockets of earth.  The contortions of the tree roots as they grew around the boulders in search of soil was beautiful and impressive.  We stopped to observe tiny orange newts that had crawled out from under damp leaf matter onto the damp trail.

Beneath a thin layer of soil is rock, the roots need someplace to go...

We saw these tiny newts

Forested Silver Lake was worth the climb.  It is used for backpacking campsites but is otherwise undeveloped.  On the way back down the mountain, we took a detour along a billy goat track to see a spectacular waterfall not visible from the normal trail.  We continued our descent along the steep path below the “penstock” pipe that brings water from Silver Lake to Lake Dunmore to generate electricity.

What a spectacular water fall!

Our descent below the penstock

What a commercial cidery looks like - Vermont Cider Company

Imagine my delight when later in the day we stopped at the Woodchuck Hard Cider cidery as part of a driving tour of the area.  The Vermont Cider Company makes many varieties of hard cider, of which Woodchuck is the best known.  You can take a self-guided tour of the cidery looking down on gleaming machinery in the plant and reading explanations that are written on the windows of what each machine does.  It was Sunday, so the plant was not working when we saw it, but the tasting room was open!  You can taste a selection of the ciders that they make in a bar with each variety on tap.  Between the four of us, we tasted just about all of them.  Of course, you can then purchase some of the types that might not be available at home.  In our enthusiasm we forgot that Canada (our next stop) has restrictions about how much alcohol that you can take into their country.  But we managed.

Cider tasting

Cousins and hiking buddies