OPEN MAY 15th to NOVEMBER 8th. TRAILS CLOSED FOR 24 HOURS AFTER ANY SIGNIFICANT RAIN EVENT.
Victory Hill Trails (VHT) is a backcountry singletrack network and race venue on the southern slopes Umpire Mountain in Victory, Vermont, one of the last towns in the U.S. to receive electricity. VHT now sports nearly 25 miles of previously secret singletrack and logging roads. The venue has plenty of room for parking, camping, hiking, and virtually no local traffic near the site.
The trails are located on private land surrounded by thousands of acres of State forestland. Conservation Collaboratives, the landowner has attempted to balance responsible forest conservation with trail development. Conservation Collaboratives began opening up logging trails for riding in order to facilitate a route for the inaugural 2009 CircumBurke Challenge, with encouragement from Dan Davis and Tim Tierney of Kingdom Trails. The CircumBurke route circumnavigates Burke and Umpire mountains and is the brainchild of Kingom Trails regulars like Dan Davis, Matt Langlais, John Worth, Kent Sourbeer, Jeff Hale and others had been riding a version of this route, for years.
John McGill of Victory Hill has tried to add more singletrack to the route mix, with each successive iteration of the CircumBurke event. In 2010 , local shredder Leif Trott cut and raked our first stretch of actual singletrack all by himself. Since then, Knight Ide and his IdeRide crew have helped McGill by designing and building gravity oriented trails on the upper hill, and linking them to the intermediate “rake and ride” and trails down below. VH now has five 1.5 mile + descending trails with more than 700 feet of vertical drop, each. In 2017, they were used for the Victory Hill Enduro in May as well as August’s CLIF Enduro East – World Series Qualifier. The system currently begins at 1950 feet altitude. In the future, the upper trails will reach 2300 feet elevation. The lowest trails begin at 1300 feet.
Directions: If you want to start off in Victory, drive towards the end of Victory Hill Rd. from Gallup Mills or North Concord and enter the trail system at the logging road gate, opposite a white cottage – 2871 VIctory Hill Road, (If you reach VIctory Hill Kennels you’ve gone too far. This spot is about 1/4 mile from the (dead) end of Victory Hill Rd..
The Victory Hill trails can also be reached by bike or on foot along the Circumburke Route by turning left at the bottom of the CCC Road as it enters Victory – onto the State of Vermont’s Weir Mill Brook Crossing Trail and following it for two miles – and following the red signs with black arrows which mark the CircumBurke route. Alternatively, take the CircumBurke route counterclockwise from East Burke on the North Pasture trail on Kingdom Trails, going to the “Gold Trail” to Victory, and turn right into the trail system instead of going onto Umpire Rd.
