Granville Gulf — Six Empty Miles — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
You're entering Granville Gulf now, and I want you to notice something as we go: for about the next six miles, there will be no houses. None. No driveways, no power lines, no mailboxes. On a road that has had villages strung along it all morning, that emptiness is startling.
That's deliberate. This is the Granville Gulf State Reservation — about twelve hundred acres of protected land in a narrow notch between the mountains, set aside precisely so that this stretch would stay wild. The road climbs through a steep-sided gulf with the White River beginning on one side and Mad River water on the other, hemlock and birch pressing right up to the pavement.
This is prime moose country, and it is one of the more likely places in Vermont to actually meet one. A moose is very dark, its eyes don't reflect headlights the way a deer's do, and it stands tall enough that your headlights light up its legs and nothing else. Dawn and dusk, take it slowly through here.
In winter this stretch is genuinely serious — it climbs, it's shaded, and it ices. And coming up on your right, unmissable and right beside the road, is one of the loveliest waterfalls in Vermont.