Small-scale society has many merits, and the entire state of Vermont is decidedly small-scale.

With a population of fewer than 650,000, a solitary international airport and only two interstate highways, the Green Mountain State is one of the country’s most rural. While its unemployment rates are among the lowest in the United States, so is the average wage—and the cost of doing business outstrips that of many other states.

Vermont has an almost mystical quality that can be felt the moment one crosses into the state from neighboring New York or Massachusetts. It’s not just the allure of the beautifully manicured farms that line the valleys between rolling green mountains. A ruggedly individualistic ethos pervades its tight-knit communities, and neighbors can be counted on to help each other during tough times. It’s a place where the impact of a person’s efforts can be felt immediately, and where homegrown industries such as maple syrup, ice cream and craft brewing can have a major economic impact.

And, for a growing number of communities—particularly in the state’s southern half—seemingly innocuous mountain bike trails are increasingly being viewed as commodities in their own right. At the epicenter of this phenomenon is the quaint town of Rochester, home to the Ridgeline Outdoor Collective (ROC), a 501c3 trail organization that is a chapter of both the Vermont Mountain Bike Association (VMBA) and the Catamount Trail Association. When the group was founded in 2013, it was initially named the Rochester/Randolph Area Sports Trail Alliance. After several years of operation, the scope of the group’s work expanded to include a broad swath of southern Vermont, including Pittsfield, so in 2021 its name was changed to the Ridgeline Outdoor Collective to be more inclusive of the many communities along the Green Mountain spine.

“The initial response [to the formation of the ROC] was a bit of a mixed bag,” says Angus McCusker, a Rochester resident and co-founder of the ROC. “We didn’t want to really come in and replace or take over what was already going on. We just wanted to add to it.”

Though all of the regional communities offer classic Vermont trails—with stunning dirt, an array of technical features and dense green tunnels—each of them has its own unique character that reflects the priorities of local trailbuilders. As with most of the country’s early trailbuilding efforts, the bulk of it happened largely under the radar, with builders in each community mostly keeping to themselves. The Rochester-area trails were defined by old-school tech, with a scene that centered around Green Mountain Bikes, the town’s decades-old bike shop. In nearby Pittsfield, Matt Baatz had for years been quietly building out one of Vermont’s most technically demanding trail networks, the Green Mountain Trails. Many of the trails between Randolph and Rochester had originally been designed by community leader Zac Freeman and a handful of other clandestine builders. But despite their close proximity, the three communities were siloed from each other in their approach to their respective trails.

Shortly after its inception, ROC began working to connect these communities in both a symbolic and financial sense, with its 501c3 status allowing it to receive donations and qualify for publicly funded trail grants. In recent years, such funding has allowed local trailbuilding efforts to diversify from the early hand-built efforts of Baatz and Freeman to modern, machine-built flow lines sculpted by the likes of northeast Vermont stalwart Tom Lepesqueur.

While such efforts have elevated the status of southern Vermont’s trails and brought the building communities closer together, for ROC, this is just the tip of the iceberg. McCusker, the group’s current executive director, also heads the Velomont Trail project, an ambitious plan to connect 19 trail networks from the Massachusetts border to as far north as Stowe via a system of huts. Thanks to ROC’s involvement, Rochester, Randolph and Pittsfield are all playing a major role in the Velomont Trail’s development.

“Several of us felt that downhill and cross-country terrain kind of go hand-in-hand, so as we lost cross-country on the mountain, we needed to find a new home for it,” Colona adds. “And that’s where the thought of this Killington Mountain Bike Club came from.”

About the time the KMBC filed for its 501c3 status, 20 miles east along U.S. Route 4 another group of Vermonters was looking to do the same for their small community. The town of Woodstock was chartered 15 years before the United States declared its independence from Great Britain and, save for a brief lull in the 19th century, it has remained a quintessential Vermont community, with scenes that might as well be straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

As with Killington, tourism is the lifeblood of Woodstock, and its mom-and-pop ski hill, Suicide Six, is one of the country’s oldest. With scores of artisan bakeries, art galleries and high-end B&Bs lining the town’s spotless roads, Woodstock stands out as one of Vermont’s most affluent communities—and its polished presentation reflects that.

“I think Woodstock sometimes has a ‘fancy high-end’ stereotype which certainly exists, but I would say that my perception of it as someone who lives here is we’re community-oriented people who care about where we live,” says Seth Westbrook, a mountain biker and trail advocate who grew up about 25 miles north of Woodstock. “It’s interesting because it’s not as in your face about its outdoors as you might find in plenty of places out west. Around here it’s a bit more of an understated part of the fabric of the community.”

A few years after graduating from college in Burlington, Westbrook answered the deep-powder call of the American West, bouncing back and forth between Eugene, Oregon and Hailey, Idaho. When he and his wife welcomed a daughter in 2010, they decided to head back to Vermont to be close to family and put down their roots in the Woodstock area.

“I think our terrain limitations have had a positive impact on our approach to building trails,” Westbrook adds. “We’re always looking to maximize the fun factor and squeeze every fun bit of terrain we can into a trail.”

Though Vermont is overwhelmingly rural, there is a corridor of communities that draws more visitors and reaps the benefits of a tourism economy. This has created significant income inequality between towns, and for those that find themselves on the outside looking in, that inequality can feel like a gulf.

“You’ve got these sections of Vermont that are very well to-do, and then there’s the rest of the state,” says Chris Smid, co-owner of the Poultney, Vermont-based roofing company New England Slate. “That’s one of the conundrums for Vermont as a whole. If we’re going to base our whole economy on tourism, we have to have to find a way to do a little better at providing a livable wage to the local folks.”

In addition to the demanding job of running a roofing company, Smid serves as president of the Poultney-based Slate Valley Trails organization, which oversees a rapidly growing network on the state’s southwestern fringes. Bordered to the west by New York, Poultney lacks the tourism-driven economy of many other Vermont destinations. But it’s loaded with another valuable resource: slate, the homogenous metamorphic rock that has made this northern edge of the Taconic Mountains a mining hotspot.

Until recently, the local economy’s dependency on mining was partially offset by the presence of Green Mountain College, which provided an employment alternative for the town of 3,200 people. Founded in 1837, the liberal arts college was renowned for its focus on environmental literacy, but in 2019 it closed its doors due to lack of funding. Following the closure, residents began searching for other sources of revenue, and some took a hard look at what mountain bike trails can mean for a community on the brink of economic ruin.

For her part, Maloney had previously worked for Stowe Land Trust, a prominent conservation group, and she had considerable experience with nonprofit management and board development. She applied that experience to helping Slate Valley Trails with strategic planning and fundraising.

Maloney and Avery were so impressed by the area’s potential that they personally invested in it, with Avery’s company, Sustainable Trailworks, buying land and contributing to further trail development.

In addition to working down here and building the trails, they now own land and are developing their own business right here in Poultney,” Smid says. “They’ve kind of bought into the long-term vision of Slate Valley Trails and decided to make this their home and see this place as a place they want to live.”

For Smid, this type of personal investment and community buy-in are what makes Vermont such a special place to live, ride and build trails.

“Being a Vermonter means respecting other people and working together in a very direct and personal way,” Smid says. “Maybe that’s what some people from outside the area like so much about Vermont. It’s a small-scale society, and a person with vision, energy and respect for others can do a lot of good here.”