Killington is a ski mountain first and a village second, and in summer that makes it oddly empty. The peak itself reaches about 4,235 feet, the second highest in Vermont's Green Mountains, and the resort sprawls over six or so connected summits with a long season that sometimes starts in October and runs into May. Out of season the base lodges are quiet, the gondola turns for hikers and mountain bikers, and the long access road feels like a corridor between condos and woods.
What a rider wants from this place is the junction. Route 4 comes over Sherburne Pass here, the old east-west route between Rutland and Woodstock, and the pass is also where the Appalachian Trail and Long Trail run together across the highway. Hikers with heavy packs often stand by the roadside at the trailhead, and the Inn at Long Trail, a log-built lodge from the 1930s, sits beside it. West of the pass the road drops toward Rutland in a long, curving descent; east, it rolls down the Ottauquechee valley past Quechee Gorge and on to Woodstock.
Nearby history is surprisingly modest and moving. A short ride south, at Plymouth Notch, Calvin Coolidge was born in 1872 and sworn in as president in 1923 by his father, a notary public, by the light of a kerosene lamp. The little village of white buildings is preserved as a state historic site and feels almost untouched. Rutland, a few miles west, was once the marble capital of the country, with quarries and mills nearby, and nearby Proctor has a marble museum.
The town has no real center, but the strip along the access road has fuel, food and a few shops, and Rutland, about seventeen kilometers off, has everything else. The best season is early October, when the hillsides turn and the whole range seems on fire, though it is also the busiest. Early June brings long light and quiet roads, and late summer is warm and green. Be ready for sudden weather: mountain showers arrive fast, and the pass is cooler than the valley by a good margin, so a spare layer earns its keep. Moose are rare but not unknown on the quieter roads.