Bike Trails VT. Lamoille Valley Rail Trail
Login or register to download files
Raw file: Lamoille Valley Rail Trail.gpx (981.21 KB)
My wife, brother and I are bicycle enthusiasts who enjoy riding the ever increasing number of rail / canal trails mostly in the Northeastern US. We also do volunteer work for NOAA by recovering US Coast & Geodetic Survey Benchmarks. We often combine these hobbies while trail riding.
Unlike geocaching, benchmark hunting serves a valuable purpose by providing NOAA with updates on the condition of their 700,000+ benchmarks across the Unites States. Information on Benchmarks is available here: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/.
We have been riding these trails for over 10 years now and I decided to share some of the .GPX files I’ve created. Of the hundreds of trails available in this part of the country, I selected these for their quality, scenic beauty, lack of excessive grades or hazardous terrain and overall riding or hiking enjoyment. These files contain tracks for trails and waypoints for significant features such as road crossings, bike shops, campgrounds, points of interest and USCGS benchmarks along or near the trail. All waypoints include elevation data for use in plotting trail slope and planning outings.
This file is the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail which when complete, will be the longest rail trail in New England and will span most of the state of Vermont. The trail will traverse 93 miles of scenic countryside from St Johnsbury in the east to Swanton in the west. The LVRT is a work in progress and as of 1/1/2016, approximately 35 miles of trail have been fully rehabilitated. The 17.5 mile run from St Johnsbury to West Danville, the 16 mile run from Morristown to Cambridge Junction and a 1.5 mile section in Swanton are open and in excellent condition. The remaining 58 miles of the LVRT, although open to the public, are not maintained and used mainly by ATV’s, snowmobiles and serious mountain bikers. Caution should be used on these sections due to bridges which are either missing or in poor condition.
This file was compiled using a variety of resources including:
Traillink.com’s LVRT web page: http://www.traillink.com/trail/lamoille-valley-rail-trail.as...
The LVRT website: http://lvrt.org/
Friends of the LVRT website: http://www.friendslvrt.org/
NOAA - http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/
Rivopom’s Combined US campgrounds POI Factory file
Garmin’s Mapsource & Basecamp software
USCGS Topographic Maps. Available legally at no cost for many States here:
http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/
Google Earth
Garmin’s Birds Eye Imagery
Various Internet & Print resources
Personal Knowledge
Anyone interested in Benchmark hunting can obtain detailed data sheets for each mark by going here: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/ds_pid.prl The PID is the waypoint name symbolized by the color coded cube icons. Green= Recovered within the last 10 years. Blue= No recent recovery but set in a massive structure which still exists. Red= Likely missing or reported destroyed.
Free, legal, 24K and 100K topo map downloads for the states with these trails are available here: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ Segments of these maps covering the above trails can be loaded into many older handheld GPS receivers with limited memory by using Garmin’s Mapinstall program available here: http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=3291
I’ll post more trail files as I update and clean them up. I always enjoy conversing with fellow bike trail enthusiasts so please feel free to contact me with comments, questions, inclusions or revisions. – Enjoy!
POI Packages
Change History
charlesd45 - Feb 11, 2016
WAV