Robert Frost Interpretive Trail in Vermont

The Robert Frost Trail is located east of East Middlebury, Vermont, east of US 7. It is well marked on the right side of Route 125 as you head east toward the Snow Bowl, halfway between Ripton Village and Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Campus. For 42 years, Frost was associated with Middlebury College and the college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus.

Frost also possessed a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was awarded a lifetime appointment to the university as a Fellow in Letters. Frost's Ann Arbor home has been moved to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In 1940, he bought a 5-acre plot in South Miami, Florida and he spent his winters there for the rest of his life.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was named Vermont's Poet Laureate in 1961 and lived and worked just a mile from this Ripton, Vermont, trail location for 23 summers in a cabin set within the 335,000 acre Green Mountain National Forest. He walked these woods often and derived inspiration from their beauty and solitude. This interpretive trail was built in 1976, 13 years after his death. In 1963, Ripton was declared "Robert Frost Country." Frost was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and many of his poems were influenced by his years in his beloved Vermont in particular and many were based on rural life in New England in general.

Unfortunately, the main loop of the interpretive trail was closed due to a 2008 flood which had destroyed this bridge, making the trail unsafe. A new metal bridge will be installed when funds allow...



We could only hike the short section leading to the bridge, but it did give us a taste of what we were missing -- a scenic trail wending through this magnificent mountain setting, interspersed with his poems presented on plaques mounted on posts as seen here...




This scenic wetlands overlook had the words "We dance around in a ring and suppose,/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows" from his poem entitled "The Secret Sits."



One of my favorite poems was on the section of trail we were allowed to walk (click photo to enlarge)...




I was disappointed we couldn't walk the mile loop trail beyond the bridge because I especially wanted to see the intersection marked with my favorite Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken," containing the lines "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."

Finally, here's his poem "Reluctance"...



I did find this web page by Kirsten Rohstedt detailing her walk on the trail one winter day.

Though he never graduated from college, Frost received over 40 honorary degrees, including ones from Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, and he was the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College.

Frost was 86 when he spoke and performed a reading of his poetry at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. He died in Boston two years later, on January 29, 1963 and was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph quotes a line from one of his poems: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."