It's worth understanding the water on this drive, because the rivers wrote the map long before anyone laid a road. The whole eastern half of the Trail follows the Deerfield River and its branches up into the mountains, and the reason is simple: a river is the one thing that's already found the low way through high country. The Native people who first walked this route followed the water, and the road builders followed them.
The Deerfield rises up in the Green Mountains of Vermont, tumbles down through these gorges, and eventually pours into the big Connecticut River — the one you crossed, or will cross, at the French King Bridge. The Connecticut is the longest river in New England, running four hundred miles from the Canadian border to the sea, and for ten thousand years its valley has been the great highway of this region. So every mile of this drive, you're following water — up the small wild rivers into the hills, and down to the great one in the valley.
Photo: John Phelan · CC BY-SA 4.0
