It has been a relentlessly wet April. But if you know Vermont, you know the rain is not a nuisance, it is a promise. Pay the mud season toll gladly. What comes next is worth every drop.
The Winooski River is running high. Hillside streams are singing loud. The sugar maples are leafing out in that pale green hue that only lasts two weeks. Vermont in April is not polished or picturesque, it is raw and extraordinary, and travelers who show up anyway are rewarded with something the summer crowds never quite see.
A winter of deep snowpack, actually like almost record breaking snowpack (read more about it here.) Followed by weeks of spring rain is, to Vermont farmers and locals, genuinely good news. The rivers fill, the aquifers recharge, and the floodplain soils that have fed this region for centuries get exactly what they need. The wet fields of April become the lush meadows of July. This is how Vermont works, and it has worked this way for a very long time.
Mud season is the price of admission. Pay it gladly. What comes next is worth every drop
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Long before Vermont was Vermont, the Abenaki people knew the river valleys here as some of the most fertile land in the Northeast. Enriched every spring by floodwaters that deposited fresh silt across the bottomlands. Settlers who arrived in the 1700s learned the same lesson: the spring floods were not a setback, they were a gift. Vermont's agricultural identity, the dairy farms, the orchards, the market gardens were built on this cycle of snow, rain, and renewal.
Nowhere is that story more visible today than Burlington's Intervale, 350 acres of working floodplain farmland along the Winooski River where more than a dozen farms grow food for the region. Walk the trail there on a wet April morning, the river high and colored-up, red-winged blackbirds back in the cattails, the first farmers turning soil, and you are watching something that has happened in this valley for thousands of years.
The lilacs are a week or two away. The trout streams are cold and full. The farmstands are not yet open, but the farms are alive with preparation. April in Vermont asks something of you — good boots, tolerance for gray skies, genuine curiosity. In return, it offers a landscape in the act of becoming. That is a rare thing to witness.
Pack layers, waterproof boots, and low expectations for sunshine. Bring high expectations for everything else.
