Travel: Cycling Quebec’s Tomifobia Nature Trail

Quebec’s Tomifobia Nature Trail, combined with the Beebe Spur Rail Trail, makes for a fun, beautiful, and mellow half-day bike ride from Newport, Vermont, to Ayer’s Cliff, Quebec. My husband and I recently rode it during peak leaf season and really enjoyed it! The trail itself is about 19 km (11.8 miles) with a very gentle grade, and you can add on a short section (about 1.5 miles) of quiet road riding plus the 4-mile Beebe Spur Rail Trail to make a fun cross-border adventure (bring your passport, whichever end you start from!).

Side note: Tomifobia is not to be confused with the English word tomophobia, or the fear of having surgery. There are apparently a few theories about the etymology of Tomifobia, possibly some version of the Abenaki/Algonquin word for “fish,” or a term for a winding river.

Logistics and bike advice

We started from Newport, Vermont, where you can park for free at North Country Hospital and pick up the Beebe Spur Rail Trail. This runs along the eastern shore of Lake Memphremagog (“great expanse of water” in the Algonquin language) for about four miles, ending at a quiet paved road.

If you’re riding with kids, older people, or anyone who just wants a short and pretty spin on their bike, you could do the eight-mile out and back on the Beebe Spur trail. This would be a totally worthwhile outing!

If you’re Canada-bound, you’ll want to bring your passport. There are places to buy food in Ayer’s Cliff (the end of the Tomifobia trail on the Quebec side), but opening hours and days seemed to vary (more on this below). Always a good idea to bring some backup snacks.

We took our gravel bikes on this ride and they were pretty much perfect. There are no significant hills, so a road bike with decent tires would also work fine. We saw a group of people on e-bikes, and honestly you could do this on a three-speed commuter bike!

Starting the ride from Newport, Vermont

We drove to North Country Hospital in Newport, Vermont and parked there. This sounds a little dubious, but it’s in the official rail trail description. You can pick up the Beebe Spur trail a very short distance from the hospital parking lot, and from there it’s a straight shot along the lake to the end of the bike path. It’s a crushed gravel surface, nice and smooth!

At the end of the trail, there apparently used to be a border crossing, but it’s no longer active. You’ll need to take a right turn onto the (quiet) paved road and ride about 1.5 miles into the town of of Beebe Plain. This is the only part of the ride with any significant hills. At the stop sign in Beebe Plain, look to the left and you’ll see the border crossing!

Once over the border, you have a couple of options for getting to the Tomifobia trail. The most direct is to ride straight down the main road (Rue Principale) and at the intersection of Rue Principale and Rue Woodside, the Tomifobia trail will take off diagonally on the right. We found the main road totally fine to ride on, but you can also ride just past the curling club (a landmark anywhere in Canada!), take a left onto what might be an old railroad bed and make your way through that neighborhood to an unmarked bike path across Rue Junction. This is a little vague because you’re on streets that don’t really have names; we navigated it using our offline mapping app Pocket Earth (iOS only).

If you choose the “weaving through town” option, you’ll take the unmarked bike path behind a bunch of houses, then you’ll come to Rue Principale where the Tomifobia trail starts at a large sign on the other side.

The trail to Ayer’s Cliff

Once on the trail, there’s some pavement, some cracked pavement, and some gravel. You’ll wind past beaver ponds, small farms, and a few very quiet road crossings, until you reach the small town of Ayer’s Cliff, Quebec.

The Tomifobia trail ends here, but you can explore various options for a longer ride, including taking your bike on the ferry across Lake Massiwippi. The Navette Le Wippi has bike racks, and joins up with the Grandes Fourches bike route network on the other side of the lake (runs in summer only).

If Ayer’s Cliff is your turnaround point, you might be ready for a snack. On an autumn weekday, the options in the center of town were pretty slim. Wood’s Snack Bar (right at the main intersection in town) had closed for the season, and the cafe on the main drag was only open on weekends. Fortunately my sister-in-law had clued us in to the coffee shop/snack bar at the local dairy, La Pinte. They’re at 1060 Rue Westmount, about a five-minute bike ride from the center of town.

There (open Monday-Saturday, approximately 9:30 until 4:30 or 5:30) you’ll find excellent coffee, baked treats, and all kinds of dairy products. We split a pint of blueberry yogurt made from local blueberries: ultra yum!

After our lunch break at La Pinte, we reversed the route, spinning back to Beebe Plain, over the border, and then back to Newport. The whole outing took about five hours at a leisurely place (including stopping in Ayer’s Cliff) and was a fun opportunity to do a kind of riding we don’t have in Colorado!