North Country Trail – Clarion River Hill trailhead towards Vermont

This leg of the North Country Trail starts off with a reasonable incline wrapping up and around the hill that 322 slices into two.

Trail / Park Info:

Parking: There are a few parking spots near a bench along 322 just before the bridge as your coming down the river hill driving towards Clarion. The spots are near a rough looking dirt road with “no-trespassing” signs, so maybe it wasn’t a good idea to park there? In any event, no one bothered our car, so I’d say its not overly risky to do the same. If your not too keen to park there, another parking option is near the trailhead leading toward North Dakota.

Directions on PCs: Locate the Google map below the search box on the right-hand side of this webpage. Click “Get Directions” on the map pin details.

Directions on Tablets and Mobile Phones: Locate the Google map near the bottom of this page, just below the search box. Click “Get Directions” on the map pin details.

In either parking spot, you will need to cross 322, which can be very busy. Be careful. You can see the trailhead for the North Dakota facing trail in the center of the photo above.

This leg of the North Country Trail starts off with a reasonable incline wrapping up and around the hill that 322 slices into two. If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed the trail would offer amazing views of the Clarion River, but that was not the case, and the river was several hundred feet from us.

The trail was wide and flat with lots of room for two people to walk side by side in most areas. There were flower boxes made out of field stones in many places but the flowers seemed to be missing. If ever we come through in spring, we may remedy that with some appropriate native flowers that would appreciate the indirect sunlight that falls here.

There wasn’t much to see here, other then a few buried gas lines from yesteryear, and a few data cables hanging low on a string of poles that intersected the path.

If you walk long enough, you’ll run into Kiser-Wagner Road. The trail markers were difficult to find, but they are there if you look hard enough, and lead down a wide path that follows the flow of a crick near Anchor Village.