At least in the winter if you’re traveling by car that is. My gazatteer shows that Lewis Pond Road leads from 105 into Lewis. But as I passed the point where the road should be, there was no road.

Lewis, VT according to the map has only one solid line road crossing into its border that can be accessed from another solid line road. Traveling east on 105, one should theoretically be able to make a left hand turn in Ferdinand onto Lewis Pond Road, follow it for two or three miles and cross into the town of Lewis. In practice though, I drove past the point where my navigation system said Lewis Pond Road should be, but I found no sign that a road ever existed there.

According to census data, the town has no inhabitants. That makes it just slightly less populated than Averill which has nine residents. I was able to enter Averill though; the highway runs through it. But stopping at the Lakeview Store in Norton, which doubles as the Averill Post office; according to the store owner, the Averill post office has never existed within the Averill town boundary, in order to photograph anything in Averill I needed to follow Forest Lake Road across the street, to Cottage Road, where eight of the town’s residents live.

I had been under the impression that as part of the VT251 club, I would also need to visit Warren Gore, which I did actually did cross into; the highway runs diagonally through it, Averys Gore and Warners Grant, neither of which can be accessed by automobile in the winter. Avery’s Gore, the Lakeview store owner warned, would probably have to be accessed on foot. I’ve always been a little confused by the gores vis-à-vis the VT 251 club since while they are shown on the map, they are not click-able towns to add to those visited, nor are they shown in the Club’s website check list of towns. In researching Vermont towns further, I found on Wikipedia "The state of Vermont has 255 political units, or 'places'. This includes 237 towns, 9 cities, 5 unincorporated areas, and 4 gores." So it’s the towns, cities and unincorporated areas that make up the 251 places one has to visit as part of the VT 251 Club. Lewis is one of the unincorporated areas. I guess the beautiful late afternoon landscape I shot in Warren Gore is a bonus.

Still, I will need to return to the northeast corner of the state in summer or autumn to visit Lewis, which I also learned from a VPR Audio Postcard, that the way it is accessed is not from Lewis Pond Road, but the Stone Dam Road entrance to the Nulhegan Refuge which I passed by last weekend thinking that one would definitely need to be driving a snowmobile to enter in winter.