Best Scenic Overlooks in Vermont
Vermont's best overlooks succeed by revealing the relationship between mountains, farmland, and valley towns rather than offering elevation for its own sake — a state where the view usually explains the geography, not just decorates it.
Mount Mansfield's Summit Ridge
The exposed upper ridge of Mansfield delivers the broadest single view in the state, taking in the Green Mountains, the Champlain Valley, and on clear days the Adirondacks across the lake — a vantage point that makes Vermont's overall topography legible in one look.
Mount Equinox Skyline Drive
Near Manchester, a five-mile toll road climbs Mount Equinox, the highest peak in the Taconic Range, to a summit developed with an inn and broadcast towers. It remains one of the only major Vermont summits reachable entirely by car, giving non-hikers a genuine high-elevation view over southern Vermont.
Mount Philo
Mount Philo offers one of the best view-to-effort ratios in New England: a short climb rewarded with a full sweep of the Champlain Valley and the Adirondacks beyond, which is why it remains one of the state's most popular family-friendly overlooks.
Smugglers' Notch
The notch road and its surrounding trails deliver a rougher, more enclosed style of mountain view than Vermont's open summit overlooks, framed tightly by cliff walls on both sides — a vantage that adds a genuinely rugged visual register to the state's more polished village imagery.
Quechee Gorge
Quechee offers a different kind of overlook altogether: not a summit view but a look straight down into a nearly 165-foot river chasm, giving visitors a sense of erosional drama that Vermont's rolling, forested terrain rarely otherwise reveals.
Lake Willoughby and the Northeast Kingdom
Lake Willoughby, flanked by two steep mountains that give it a fjord-like profile found almost nowhere else in New England, produces one of the state's most striking combined water-and-mountain views — proof that some of Vermont's strongest overlooks sit well outside the busier central tourism corridor.
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