Retired Bethel Couple Gravel Biked All 252 Towns in Vermont

This ride doesn’t seem too hard, I thought, just as Marcia Gauvin and Chris Leister steered their bikes off the pavement and led me up a long, steep gravel road into the hills of Ludlow. Admittedly, “steep” is a relative term. This year alone the retired Bethel couple have biked nearly 2,000 miles and climbed more than a quarter-million vertical feet, often at much steeper grades. By their standards, the dirt road that kicked my butt last week was a gentle ascent.

Their July 2023 trip up Beartown Road in Sandgate was a different story. During that ride, Gauvin and Leister gained 1,500 feet of elevation over six miles, then descended another three miles at a 21 percent grade on loose gravel and washed-out ledges. For reference, Vermont’s notorious Lincoln Gap Road briefly hits a 24 percent grade — on pavement.

“A sane person might rather skip this altogether, and turn around to backtrack the route. Not us!” Gauvin wrote in her description of the trip. “Bear Road was a bear of a ride — if you could even call it riding!”

Last week, Gauvin, 62, and Leister, 70, invited me to join them on the final ride of their four-year project to gravel bike all 252 towns in Vermont. In the process, they’ve documented each ride with GPS-mapped routes, directions, photos and detailed trip descriptions, including interesting attractions along the way. All of their rides are available for free on the couple’s website, 251vtgravelrides.org — tagline: “Biking Vermont One Gravel Road at a Time.”

Gauvin and Leister first got together in May 2021. A longtime runner, she had torn her meniscus, and her doctor suggested that she take up cycling instead.

“I was so bummed,” she recalled. “I knew nothing about biking.”

“But she was a good learner,” Leister said with a smile.

Leister has been a lifelong mountain, road and gravel biker. The Rochester native and licensed EMT served on ski patrol for 41 years. For the past 20 years he’s volunteered with Green Mountain Bike Patrol, providing medical support at marathons and bike races throughout New England. Tall and lean, with calves as taut as rubber bands, he’s logged thousands of miles in the saddle. Gauvin described him as “a tornado in human form.”

When Leister began looking for a new life partner a few years ago, he placed a personals ad in Seven Days, making it clear that any respondents had to be game for frequent outdoor adventures. Gauvin, who is much shorter but built like a distance runner, reached out.

The couple’s first date was, unsurprisingly, a bike ride. According to Gauvin, it felt more like he was testing her physical stamina.

“I chose a very gentle hill, just to see what she could do,” Leister said. “And she went up and up and up! I figured she’d want to turn around soon. But no, she wanted to keep going.”

Gauvin and Leister climbed more than 1,000 feet that day, and she maintained his pace the entire time. “I thought, This is good,” Leister said.

Soon, Gauvin and Leister were an item. In September 2021, a friend told them about the 251 Club of Vermont, which formed in 1954 to encourage people to visit — and not just drive through — every town in the state. When Leister suggested that they do it on gravel bikes, the couple joined the club and immediately hit the road. By year’s end they had 18 towns under their belts; they added another 53 by the end of 2022. Last year, the pair purchased a 17-foot camper trailer to enable them to ride through more remote towns in the state without returning home each night.

Leister, who founded and still owns an environmental design and permitting company in Bethel, created a spreadsheet to track their progress. He uses a combination of maps from the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources’ online atlas and Strava, a popular fitness app, to plot their routes. Many include unmaintained Class 4 roads.

“The rule in my mind is, If it doesn’t have a house or a deer camp on it once in a while, the road probably isn’t there,” Leister said.

Gauvin, a retired technology teacher at Woodstock Elementary School, decided after their first 50 rides that they should create a website so others could replicate their trips. Ironically, the two self-described “data nerds” can’t remember which ride was their first on the path to 252.

“We don’t have rules. We have goals,” she said. The 251 Club of Vermont doesn’t require members to document every town with photos, but Gauvin and Leister do so anyway. And while the couple prefer riding gravel roads, that wasn’t always possible. Winooski, their shortest ride at just one mile, had none. The same was true when they returned to Essex Junction after the town parted company from Essex in July 2022 and became its own municipality. (Like the 251 Club, the couple didn’t update their website address to reflect Vermont’s new town count.)

The couple’s longest ride for this project — they’ve done plenty of cycling that wasn’t meant for picking up new towns — was 60 miles, when they pedaled the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail in July 2024. That trip bagged them seven towns in one trip: Swanton, Highgate, Fairfield, Sheldon, Bakersfield, Fletcher and Cambridge.

“With only 570 feet of elevation gain per 30 miles, our average speed was way higher and vertical climbing WAY lower per mile than our normal rides,” they wrote on the trip description. Typically, the couple climb 1,000 vertical feet for every 10 miles they ride.

Gauvin and Leister’s largest one-day elevation gain happened during the Tour de Creemee in June 2024. The noncompetitive ride is open to everyone and starts and finishes at Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in East Montpelier. They rode 59 miles over 5.5 hours and climbed more than 6,200 feet, ticking off Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex, Woodbury and Worcester.

Though the couple had surprisingly few equipment malfunctions, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Two summers ago they rode through Plainfield right after the July floods, with plans to tackle Marshfield and Groton, too. En route to Stillwater State Park, they expected the road to be well maintained.

“It was just gone!” Gauvin recalled. “Just a field of boulders.” A local informed them that a beaver dam had burst and washed out the road. They ended up walking their bikes for much of the route.

The couple’s most disappointing equipment snafu happened last month during a ride that was supposed to include Newport Town, Newport City, Holland and Derby. Early on in their planned 50-mile excursion, Gauvin broke a shifting cable and could only pedal in high gear. Though they managed to hit three towns in 13 miles, “We were going up a hill, so of course we were out of business that day,” Leister said.

While Leister pedaled back to town to get their car, Gauvin sat on the roadside in Derby counting pickup trucks. “I stopped counting when I got to 200,” she said.

One goal of every ride, Gauvin explained, was to find something interesting to see or do in each town, be it Hero’s Welcome general store in North Hero or the new outdoor privy at the East Barnard Church being constructed by retired furniture maker Randy Leavitt.

“We try to find something fun,” Gauvin said, “but sometimes you can’t because you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

On the couple’s final ride in Ludlow, we paused to take photos of a 20-megawatt solar farm operated by Coolidge Solar, followed by a massive utility substation just up the road. The substation provides power to the town of Ludlow and nearby Okemo Mountain Resort. Gauvin, who shoots most of the photos, also stopped to shoot an apiary and a giant rooster sculpture.

As we climbed Chapman Road, Leister got a phone call from one of his employees. While I huffed and puffed up the hill, he fielded the business call without slowing his ascent or breaking a sweat.

“He says he’s retired,” Gauvin said, “which means he works 30 hours a week instead of 80.”

As we neared the top of the hill, something caught Gauvin’s eye: a vintage train car parked beside a house. As she slowed down to photograph it, she didn’t notice that Leister had already stopped in front of her. She rear-ended his bike, knocking the chain off its gear and getting it stuck in the rear spokes. For 20 minutes, our trip was derailed by a railcar and a derailleur.

While Leister wrested the chain free by removing the rear wheel, the equipment snafu gave me a much-needed breather and Gauvin an opportunity to speak to the property owner about the decades-old sleeper car, which once belonged to the Green Mountain Railroad.

By the end of our 9.5-mile journey, we had climbed nearly 1,200 feet. Though I was bushed, Gauvin and Leister looked like they had the energy to pedal our route a second time. “If you ride it in reverse, it’s a completely new ride,” he said enthusiastically.

As we loaded the bikes on the cars, I asked the couple if they felt sad that this was their last town. They didn’t, as they have plenty more bike trips planned for the future.

“We’ve both done a lot of things in our lives, but we’re pretty proud of this project,” Gauvin said with a smile. “My biggest wish is that someone else will do it. That was the whole point.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Chain Reactions | A retired Bethel couple gravel biked through every town in Vermont and created a free online guide for others to follow”

This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.

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