Stopping by VT 125 on a Snowy Evening

Suffering the Robert Frost Wayside Trail

If the luster of fresh snow in a spruce forest soothes your heart and activates your loins, then you’ve probably savored some Robert Frost poems. The son of a San Francisco journalist, Frost sold his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to New York’s The Independent for the price of $15 back in 1894. (Today, this fee would have been roughly $470, which is slightly more than most of the big media companies will now pay for a 1,000 word digital story.) Frost was able to parlay his early releases into a prolific career of documenting rural life in New England via poetry. He nabbed four Pulitzers and Vermont named him the state poet laureate in 1961. But long before then, Frost had been spending his summers and falls teaching the craft of poetry at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, a creative writing institution that’s literally perched on a windy mountainside in the tiny township of Ripton, Vermont.

And less than 10 minutes west of the Bread Loaf campus, on the shoulder of VT 125—the steep, undulating road that passes through the Middlebury Gap mountain pass—there is an enchanting trail that’s literally marked with selected Robert Frost poems.