Hogback Mountain

Hogback Mountain sits on VT-9 in Marlboro, on the Brattleboro side of southern Vermont's main east-west road. The summit is 2,409 feet, and the Route 9 overlook at roughly 2,400 feet is the "100-Mile View," about 3.5 miles east of Wilmington and about 15 miles west of Brattleboro. On a clear day you can see into Massachusetts and out to Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. VT-9 itself runs almost 47 miles from the New York line at Bennington to the New Hampshire line at Brattleboro, and locals know it as the Molly Stark Trail.

Here is the thing truckers need to keep straight. Hogback is the famous part, but it is not where the chain law bites. The chain-control zone and almost all the documented winter truck crashes are on the western climbs, over Searsburg and through Woodford between Bennington and Wilmington. Vermont DMV says plainly there is no chain requirement on the Hogback Mountain portion of VT-9. So the view is on the east end, the danger is on the west end, and chains only become mandatory (when the law is activated) on the Wilmington-to-Bennington half.

The western side is where the grades get long and steep. From just outside Bennington the road climbs a steady grade for the first several miles, then winds up to a plateau over Searsburg, where descriptions put the grades at 7 to 8 percent with sharp curves. VT-9 even has a runaway truck ramp in Woodford. The corridor has a long record of winter chaos: tractor-trailers stuck on the hills or jackknifed on the curves, shutting the road for hours.

• VT-9 runs 46.959 miles across southern Vermont from Bennington to Brattleboro, the major east-west corridor in the south of the state (Wikipedia, Vermont Route 9)
• Hogback Mountain summit is 2,409 feet (734 m) in Marlboro; the Route 9 overlook sits at roughly 2,400 feet (Wikipedia, Hogback Mountain (Vermont))
• The overlook is about 3.5 miles east of Wilmington and about 15 miles west of Brattleboro (Wikipedia)
• The Searsburg climb on the western side is described at 7 to 8 percent grades with sharp curves; no official VTrans grade-sign value for Hogback was located
• Vermont's chain law is 23 V.S.A. section 1006c, added 2009 and amended in 2015 and 2017 (Vermont Statutes Online)
• Chains apply to vehicles over 26,000 lbs GVWR or GCWR when the law is posted (Vermont DMV; 23 V.S.A. section 1006c)
• Penalty is a $1,000 civil penalty, or $2,000 if it substantially impedes traffic, doubled for repeat offenses within three years (23 V.S.A. section 1006c)

There is no fixed calendar season for the Route 9 chain law. VTrans activates and deactivates it storm by storm. When it is on, chains are mandatory only on the segment from the Wilmington chain-up site to the Bennington chain-up site, the western half of the route, and never on the Hogback Mountain portion. A typical cycle was Nov 11, 2025: the law went active around 4:45 p.m., then deactivated early the next morning between Bennington and Wilmington once the storm passed. To see whether it is on right now, check VTrans on Facebook, the VT511 feed, the 511 traveler-information website, or watch for a VT-Alert. VTrans posts when it activates and again when it deactivates.

For decades the name meant skiing. The Hogback Mountain Ski Area ran on Mount Olga across Route 9 from 1946 to 1986, working off natural snow and T-bars, and it closed reportedly because of insurance costs. Later about 590 acres were bought and given to the Town of Marlboro as conservation land. That land, the Hogback Mountain Conservation Area, straddles VT-9 and still holds old ski lifts and a fire lookout tower.

The chain-control story is more recent. Vermont enacted its chain-law authority, 23 V.S.A. section 1006c, in 2009. Then in late 2014 VTrans built the state's first chain-up areas, one at the Bennington Welcome Center off Route 279 and one at the Harriman Reservoir marina in Wilmington, specifically to deal with repeated winter truck incidents on the Bennington-to-Wilmington hills. The whole project ran about $20,000, including roughly $15,000 for seven rented warning signs. The road carries the name Molly Stark Trail after Molly Stark, wife of Revolutionary War general John Stark, and it follows the old 1920s-era New England Interstate Route 9.