Our Snail Tracks

September 24, 2024

Beautiful Lake Champlain is a boundary between Vermont and New York, with the Adirondack Mountains to the west and the Green Mountains to the east. It is the sixth largest lake in the U.S., with its widest point 14 miles across.

We stopped in Burlington, Vermont, and explored the town by riding bikes along Lake Champlain. The Burlington Greenway Bike/Walk Path offers eight miles of paved path right along the shoreline.

Are Lake Monsters real? There are many stories of a giant serpent in Lake Champlain. The legends go back to the Indigenous people who lived in the area, the Abenaki and the Iroquois. The alleged lake monster, now known as Champ, has captured imaginations for centuries. Champ is celebrated today as mascot of the local baseball team, the Lake Monsters.

Samuel de Champlain, whom the lake is named after, is sometimes credited with being the first European to sight Champ. His written accounts of a similar monster in the St. Lawrence River give an idea of what he saw:

Champlain described what he saw: “. . . there is one called by the natives Chaousarou, which is of various lengths; but the largest of them, as these tribes have told me, are from eight to ten feet long. I have seen some five feet long, which were as big as my thigh, and had a head as large as my two fists, with a snout two feet and a half long, and a double row of very sharp, dangerous teeth. Its body has a good deal the shape of the pike; but it is protected by scales of a silvery gray colour and so strong that a dagger could not pierce them.”

Historians think Champ is probably a garfish, a class that includes lake sturgeon, which still live in Lake Champlain today.