Yankee Magazine: The Mad River Valley ‘Feels Undiscovered’

We love it when others recognize what we know so well: Vermont’s Mad River Valley, the place we call home, is a jewel, especially during foliage season.

Writer Annie Graves from Yankee Magazine trekked to the valley last year about this time, stayed with us at the inn, and wrote about her visit recently in the September/October edition of the magazine.

Here’s how she started her story:

It is a rogue river—running north.

That was the first theory I heard about the Mad River’s name, and in the end, it was my favorite. The wayward water courses up from Granville Notch, deep in the Green Mountains, and tumbles through a picturesque Vermont valley dotted with villages, red barns, and church steeples, until it finishes just north of Montpelier, with an exhale into the Winooski River.

And about the inn she writes:

All I can say is that if you ever experience bombogenesis, I hope you’re stranded at the Pitcher Inn, in the heart of minuscule Warren Village. The deliciously understated Relais & Châteaux retreat is the psychological equivalent of a deep dive into a Vermont Flannel blanket—which, by the way, shows up for my in-room picnic, complete with charcuterie, in front of a crackling fire.

The skies opened, the rain poured down, and I was happily holed up in the Mountain Room, paneled with sheets of rock, with a plump bed set inside a replica of a fire tower. Chef Jacob Ennis roasted Brussels sprouts and flavored the squash soup with horseradish cream and juniper oil. Comfort food was redefined as pappardelle pasta laced with cauliflower cream. That night, there was a bedside chocolate cookie of rugged mountain density and proportion.

You can read Annie’s full story, “Fall in Vermont’s Mad River Valley|Turn Up the Color,” at the Yankee Magazine website.