The Vermont Paddlers Club

Saturday, October 26 offered a beautiful, crisp afternoon, and I needed to get out of Burlington, so I headed east and south to German Flats Road in Fayston. My original plan was to check and see if a couple of river-wide logs on Mill Brook were still present, but when arrived I recalled my interest in exploring the tributary along German Flats Road.

I arrived about 2:20 pm, and I spent the next 2.5 hours exploring the brook on foot. My hope was that it offered an interesting extension of the usual run on Mill Brook along Route 17 (Mill Brook Road). My main concern was that it might be too wood-choked to be worthwhile.

My initial hike upstream from near Route 17 revealed a continuous Class 2/3 stretch with a number of logs to avoid, but with easy ways to walk around them. The brook flows through some lovely woods, much of which turn out to be part of Fayston's Chase Brook Town Forest, which connects to extensive network of mountain biking trails.

At a certain point I was blocked by private land, which could have been circumvented by fording the brook and continuing on the river-right bank. I didn't want to drench my hiking shoes, so I headed back to my car, and drove up further up German Flats Road to look for additional access points.

Fortunately, I came upon the trailhead and parking area for the Chase Brook Town Forest trail, which is almost directly across from the Fayston Elementary School. A recently constructed foot bridge connects the parking area to the trail on the river-right bank. I parked, crossed the bridge, and headed downstream along the brook. The Town Forest trail quickly heads uphill into the forest, but there is an older trail (no longer in use) that follows the brook. That allowed me to scout the section that I had previously missed. I found more wood, but the river gradient remained steady, with interesting features in the riverbed, including an apparently natural log dam that impounds a shelf of gravel and cobblestones, forming a 3.5 or 4 foot drop. (There is a narrow bypass on river-left.)

A check later on Google Maps showed that the total length from the trailhead down to Mill Brook is about 0.71 miles or maybe a bit more (accounting for bends not shown on the map). This is a substantial addition to the run from the culvert at the Mill Brook Road intersection, making a total of 2.35 miles down to the takeout just above the final bridge before Route 100. I think this is well worth some effort to clean up some or all of the obstructions, several of which are small diameter logs. I hope to recruit a small crew to do the work this fall.