Long Trail hikers will need to take a detour to use the Winooski Valley footbridge in Bolton for the next month or so.
A portion of Duxbury Road between the footbridge and Honey Hollow Road will be closed for construction from Oct. 20 through roughly Nov. 18, according to the Green Mountain Club.
The road was heavily damaged during flooding in 2024, and was compromised by a landslide. The town of Bolton is hoping to fix it before the end of construction season.
Bolton Town Administrator Dania Allowan said funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency allowed the town to move forward with the project.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Allowan said. “We’ve been working through the design, the permitting, the long funding process since the flooding, and this was the earliest window that we could move forward with it.”
In the meantime, hikers will walk part of Duxbury Road from the Duxbury Window trailhead, and turn onto an old woods road that runs through private land at the closure.
“We’re really fortunate that we have very friendly neighbors in the state of Vermont,” said GMC Executive Director Mike DeBonis. “We just want to remind folks that we are using private land. People are letting us use this land out of their goodwill, and just to be good stewards of the land and have a great, cool hike.”
DeBonis said the reroute goes up into an old field and is marked with blue flagging.
The Monroe and Duxbury Window trailheads will still be open, but hikers will need to access them from Waterbury.
He said the club will be working on infrastructure repairs like this one along the Long Trail from the last two years of flooding for several years.
“It becomes more challenging when you have multiple major flooding events in a row, and you can only fix so much in a given year, so we just have to be really strategic,” he said.
