Lake Dunmore

Lake Dunmore sits in Addison County, Vermont, a 985-acre body of water pinned between Route 53 and the Green Mountain National Forest, with Mount Moosalamoo rising directly off its eastern shore. Salisbury and Leicester are the two towns that actually touch the water — small enough that neither has its own gas station — and Branbury State Park, on the lake's east side, is the only public swimming access: a thousand feet of natural sand beach, a boat launch, and campsites tucked under the mountain's lower slope. The lake's real infrastructure lives ten minutes north in Middlebury, home to Middlebury College and Addison County's only hospital. Otter Creek runs straight through downtown and drops eighteen feet over a limestone shelf in the middle of Main Street — a waterfall you can watch from a bridge without lacing up boots. Around it: Jessica's at the Swift House Inn for the dinner that earns a reservation, Two Brothers Tavern's thirty-two draft lines, a cidery that gives self-guided tours of its own production line, and a farmers' market that runs through the winter indoors rather than closing for the season. Across Route 53 from Branbury, the Falls of Lana trail climbs past a waterfall on Sucker Brook toward Silver Lake and the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area's seventy miles of trail — the reason serious hikers book Dunmore over lakes with better real estate but worse access to the Green Mountains. On the water itself, Waterhouses has run a marina out of the same West Shore Road address since 1876, renting pontoons and kayaks alongside a campground and the lake's only true waterside bar. The lake runs quiet outside of July and August — swimming season is short, and Middlebury's own rhythm shifts with the college calendar, busier during the school year than in summer. Come for the beach and the falls; stay because Middlebury, unlike most lake towns this size, can actually feed you for a week.