Upper Valley Trails Alliance

Trail care true to our Alliance founding principles, we are working with a large number of Upper Valley communities and partners providing expertise and technical assistance for trail projects including: in 2023 uvta worked on over 30 trail projects, building and improving over 80 miles of Trails in the region. Partnering with many towns, businesses, foundations, and organizations. Uvta organized over 200 volunteers totaling over 1,900 hours of work. Uvta staff and volunteers rebuilt the historic bicentennial trail on mt. Ascutney and improved the river trail in hanover. Utva also built an accessible trail through the chaffee wildlife santuary and completed phase 2 of an accessible trail in the milton frye nature area. Uvta has expanded it's lending tool shed provding quality hand tools to our devoted volunteers and members.

Progress is being made on the mascoma river greenway, a 4-mile extension of the northern rail trail from lebanon to west lebanon. Uvta plays a leadership role on the mascoma river greenway coalition. In 2023, project partners created a super quest featuring the greenway, began a pilot cycling without age program featuring the greenway, established a citizen science project along the greenway, and invited artists to install painted murals in the greenway tunnel.

Trail finder and trail programs the passport to winter fun, uvta's nationally recognized program that promotes physical activity in the winter months had a record breaking year, serving 5,500+ students in 32 elementary schools and 31 homeschool groups in 2023. Uvta's trail finder now provides information on over 925 trail systems and 5000 miles of Trails in Vermont and new hampshire with free online access. There were over 350,000 visitors to the website in 2023. Uvta offers a series of unique events in the Upper Valley including the tour de taste pedal picnic, and the stoaked trail race. Our summer program, Upper Valley high school trail corps brought students from across the Upper Valley out on a 5-week trail crew program in summer 2023. In the last 10 years over 400 students have provided 8000 hours of service and improved over 500 miles of Trails in more than 50 locations. Uvta's intership program for summer trail stewards became a permanent educational offering. In 2023, 8 trail stewards helped work on 100+ miles of trail while learning new skills.