Support the
Upper Valley Trails Alliance Click Images Below
Giveline is an online store created for the community-minded shopper, offering a huge variety of useful products ranging from books and music to housewares and electronics.
Every purchase generates a substantial donation to
support Upper Valley Trails Alliance programs, averaging 16%
of store sales.
News
Trail of the Month Saturday, April 26, 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Mount Ascutney Road
Join the Upper Valley Trails Alliance and our Trail of the Month partner, Sierra Club, for a spring hike up Mount Ascutney Road.
It's a great place to take in some great views of the Connecticut River Valley without impacting area trails during mud season.
Directions: I-91 to Exit 8, east on Rte. 133 to Rte. 5 North for 2 miles towards Windsor. Turn left onto route 44A, continue for approx. 1 mile, parking in the pull off located across from the State Park.
Contact John Taylor for details or to carpool from Lebanon.
Distance to the upper parking lot on paved surface (possibly snow covered in upper elevations) is 3.5 miles. Road slopes moderate
TRAIL WORKERS NEEDED
Wright's Mountain Trails
Bradford, Vermont Click Here for Spring Dates and Details
Trails Connect – Creating a Regional Trail System was held on 3/27/08 and was a great success with over 100 people in attendance. Event flyer
Winter Weekends
WinterFest held January 13, 2008 Skate-athon held January 20, 2008 Event photos
Thank you to everyone that helped out at the Lake Morey Winter Weekends! Volunteers’ great energy and support made the events a huge success. We hope to see you all out on the ice!
Passport to Winter Fun Click here to learn more about the Passport to Winter Funfor 2008 program. Developed by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance, funded by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Active Living by Design program, the Byrne Foundation, the Wal-Mart Foundation, the Ottauquechee Health Foundation, and the Vermont Teddy Bear Company.
The 2008 Passport
to Winter Fun!
The Passport to Winter Fun is a program created by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance (UVTA) that is designed to encourage children and their families to become more active outdoors during the winter months. The Passport is an 18-page booklet containing a 30-step trail. Participants move one step further along the trail each day they engage in 60 minutes or more of physical activity outdoors. In addition to the trail, the Passport provides a list of ideas for winter enjoyment, a means to record achieving each new step through travel diary entries and drawings, and a series of incentives that encourage children and families to regularly spend an hour or more outside enjoying the winter. The 2008 Passport to Winter Fun program in the Upper Valley will run from mid-January to the beginning of March.
Click Here to view more about Passport Click Here for Grand Prize Raffle Prizes!
Tour de Taste: A Pedaling Picnic
Click Here for Tour de Taste map, menu & event details
Enjoying the Tour de Taste Stop at Fairlee Green
Thank you to all participants, supporters and volunteers for making our first ever Tour de Taste a wonderful and tasty success. On the afternoon of Sunday, September 9, over a hundred people enjoyed traveling at their own pace on a 16 mile scenic bicycle ride - over rolling hills and along the picturesque Connecticut River with several "munch" stops along the way to sample local produce and other special foods on this progressive picnic.
"Go Walking! A
Guide to Trails in the Upper Valley"
UVTA's
trail guide is available in local bookstores and from the UTVA
Office for $10 to individuals. "Go Walking!: A Guide to Walking
in the Heart of the Upper Valley" contains routes in the
towns of Hanover, Hartford, Lebanon and Norwich, with a focus
on easy to moderate trails for the less experienced trail user.
The guide was produced as part of Upper
Valley Trails for Life, our ongoing initiative to promote
active living in the region through
the use of trails.
Each
of the over 20 trails listed in the guide features in-depth directions, an
easy-to-read map, information on who owns and maintains the trail, and
suggestions for extending the route. On top of the routes themselves, the
guide also includes contact information for local trail groups, a log to
track your activity, information on indoor walking, and tips on everything
from preparing for weather conditions to working activity into your daily
routine.
"Go
Walking!" is available from the UTVA Office for $10 to help
cover printing costs, though some of the maps can be downloaded
for free (.pdf format) from the Trails
section of the UVTA webpage. The guide is also offered to patients
as part of DHMC's Prescription Walking Program. Some of the maps
(currently in earlier versions) can be downloaded for free (.pdf
format) from the Trails section of
the UVTA webpage.
Upper
Valley Trails for Life is funded in part by a grant from the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation's Active
Living by Design program. For more information on active living,
click here, or see the previous
news article on the UVTA's grant. For specific tips on how
to work activity into your daily routine, click here.
Wild Ice Skating Trails
The Upper Valley Trails Alliance collaborated with local skating enthusiasts to keep two lake skating trails open over the winter of 2006-07. Thanks to a grant from the Davis Conservation Foundation, the Lake Morey Skating Trail (up to 2 ½ miles long) in Fairlee and Deweys Pond (1 mile loop) in Quechee were open for skaters to enjoy. If you are interested in receiving ice condition updates, e-mail Jamie@nordicskater.com to be included on their listserve. Skate rentals: Nordic Skater, Norwich www.nordicskater.com Wilderness Trails, Quechee www.scenesofvermont.com/wildernesstrai ls
UVTA Supports Bicycle and
Pedestrian Initiatives
The
Hanover Community Action Plan Workshops, a series of workshops that
took place between March 2005 and January 2006, brought together residents
of northwest Hanover to discuss and rate the "walkability" and
"bikeability" of several proposals for the Lyme Road
("Dresden") Village Center (the neighborhood surrounding the
Richmond and Ray Schools). The outcome of the workshops will be a
prioritized list of actions that the community can take to improve walking
and biking in the area.
The
workshops were organized by UVTA together with a volunteer committee of
community members, the Town of Hanover, the National Park Service's Rivers & Trails Program, and NH Celebrate Wellness' Livable, Walkable
Communities program.
UVTA
also worked with the City of Lebanon to help plan and host the Lebanon
Community Trails Forum, a facilitated public forum about the future of
trails, trail connections, and bicycle, wheelchair and pedestrian pathways
throughout the City.Close to 100 people attended the three-and-a-half hour
evening session on March 2 to generate ideas and come up with an action
plan which will inform the City's master plan for trails.
UVTA
continues to work with both communities on walkability and bikeability as
part of Upper Valley Trails for Life, which seeks to increase opportunities
for Upper Valley residents to incorporate physical activity into their
daily lives. Trails for Life is is one of 25 initiatives in the country
funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Active Living By Design
Program.
'Trailbuilder'
Email List
UVTA receives large amounts of information on opportunities and
resources for people who build and maintain trails, such as representatives
of local or regional trail organizations, community trails committees or
conservation commissions, planners, and regular volunteers. However, due to
the wide-ranging interests of the current UVTA email list, this information
is not sent out to avoid congesting inboxes with unwanted mail. Therefore,
a separate 'Trailbuilder' email list is being compiled to disseminate
trail-specific information. If you are interested in joining this list,
send an email to Trails@Valley.net.
There is no obligation to join this new list, nor will joining it affect
your status on UVTA's current email list.
.
Prescription
Walking Program Now Underway
In an effort to increase awareness about the importance of physical
activity as part of Upper Valley Trails for Life,
UVTA, in association with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, has initiated
a perscription walking program. Clinicians at DHMC have now been trained to
write perscriptions for a set amount of physical
activity to sedentary patients.
Posters, brochures, trail guides and pedometers provided by UVTA are now
available in the exam rooms of DHMC, to further encourage and motivate
inactive patients, while providing them tips
to get going, and ways to track their progress.
Additionally, many medical students have volunteered to serve as
"coaches" in this program, offering advice and support to
individual patients, as well as leading easy hikes and other activites
geared toward those just starting to increase their activity level.
UVTA and DHMC's prescription walking program has gained nationwide media
attention thanks to an AP report out of Concord, NH. The story has been
reproduced across the country, in such notable papers as USA Today and the San Francisco Chronicle. A search on Google News reveals at least 93 versions
of the story online. For the full text from USA Today, click here
For additional coverage, click here to read the Valley
News report, and click here to see the
DHMC Community News story (2.7 MB - download may take a few minutes).
Notable Grants and Awards
In late 2003, the Upper Valley Trails
Alliance (UVTA) received a five-year grant
of $200,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to
support "Upper Valley Trails for
Life," a local multidisciplinary partnership and program
developed to increase "active living"
through the use of trails and walking/biking routes. [read
more]
In 2005, L.L. Bean gave $25,000 to the Upper
Valley Trails Alliance in support of local trail projects in connection
with the opening of its new retail store in West
Lebanon. The gift was used, in collaboration with
the Lebanon Recreation & Parks Department and the Lebanon
Conservation Commission, to install informational kiosks at trailheads
on conservation lands in Lebanon
to help users find trails and to educate them about wise and sustainable
trail use. In addition, UVTA allocated part of the gift to a new
Trail Stewardship Fund to support projects of local grassroots
trail organizations.
Also in 2005, the Upper Valley Trails for Life
partnership, in which UVTA is the lead organization, received
the "Community of Excellence" Award in May at the annual
meeting of Active Living by Design grantees in Chapel
Hill, NC. The award recognizes Trails for Life as the top project
among the 25 grantees from around the country during the first
year of the five-year grant cycle funded by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation.
Trail Groups Online
The Upper Valley Trails Alliance lists
over 200 organizations on this
website. You can find these organizations by town in which they
are active, or by the type of activity that they promote. Of the
200, some two-dozen are dues-paying organizational members of UVTA. For a complete
list of these organizational and more information on them, click
here.
Support Our Sponsors
Please support and thank the Upper Valley businesses who are investing in
our quality of life and the trail system of the Upper Valley.
