Smugglers' Notch pass cliff walls
— — a road the boulders chose.
Not only on a wall.
“A narrow gap in the spine of the Green Mountains, where Vermont Route 108 threads between thousand-foot cliff walls and house-sized boulders fallen from above. The road is single-lane in places and closed all winter. The walls hold cold long after the valleys warm. In summer climbers work the routes; in shoulder season the pass belongs to the rock and the wind moving through it.
Smugglers' Notch pass cliff walls, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Smugglers' Notch is a high pass on Vermont Route 108 between Stowe and Jeffersonville, threading between Mount Mansfield and Sterling Peak in the Green Mountains. The summit of the pass sits at 2,162 feet, the highest point on a Vermont state highway. The name dates to the 1807 Embargo Act, when Vermonters used the gap to move cattle and goods across the Canadian border in defiance of federal law. Smuggling resumed during Prohibition. The pass lies in Mount Mansfield State Forest, Lamoille County.
The cliff walls rise nearly a thousand feet above the road, schist and quartzite shaped by glacial scour and freeze-thaw fracture. House-sized boulders called talus litter the roadbed, with names locally: Elephant's Head, Smugglers' Head, the Hunter and his Dog. Rock climbing routes work both sides, with the longest pitches on the south wall toward Mansfield. The Green Mountain Club maintains the Long Trail through the notch, the original 1910 footpath that runs the length of Vermont end to end.
The pass closes to vehicles from late October to mid-May, gated at both ends. Snow piles deep enough that plowing the single-lane curves through the boulders is not practical. The closure turns the road into a backcountry corridor for skiers and snowshoers, with the silence broken only by ice falling off the cliff faces. The pass reopens by Memorial Day in most years, though late snow has held it shut into June. Spring melt brings small waterfalls down the walls for a week or two.