Sell Your Land in Buels, Vermont

Buels Gore sits in the northeastern corner of Chittenden County, wedged into the Green Mountains between Huntington and Bolton, with Fayston and Waitsfield just over the ridge in Washington County. It isn't a town in the usual Vermont sense — it's one of the handful of surviving gores, an odd sliver left over from the colonial-era surveying that didn't quite line up town boundaries and left this steep, forested wedge of mountain unclaimed by any neighboring township. There's no village, no general store, no town green. Vermont Route 17 climbs through it on its way up to Appalachian Gap, one of the highest paved road crossings in the state, and that's about the only real infrastructure running through the place. The population has stayed in the single or low double digits for as long as anyone's kept count. What you find here instead of a town center is mountain — steep, wooded, and largely wild, tucked against the Camel's Hump State Park backcountry.

The history of land in Buels Gore is really a history of it never quite becoming a hill farm town the way its neighbors did. Huntington and Bolton both saw sheep and dairy operations on their lower slopes, but the terrain inside the gore itself was too steep, too rocky, and too high for that kind of agriculture to take hold in any lasting way. What settlement there was centered on logging — cutting spruce, hemlock, and hardwood off the mountainsides for lumber and later pulp — and later on a handful of camps built for hunting and maple sugaring. Because full-time farming families never really put down roots here, the land didn't go through the usual Vermont cycle of cleared pasture reverting to brush. Much of Buels Gore has stayed forested straight through, which is part of why it reads today as unbroken woodland rather than old fields growing back.

The people who own vacant land in the gore now tend to fall into a few familiar categories. There are long-held family timber tracts passed down through generations who logged the land decades ago and have simply kept paying the taxes since. There are out-of-state owners who inherited a hunting camp lot or a piece of a larger parcel from a relative and have no real use for a steep Vermont mountainside a five-hour drive from where they live. And there are a few landowners who bought raw acreage years back with plans for a camp that never got built, and who are now carrying the tax bill on land they visit once a year, if that.

Parcels in Buels Gore run toward the larger side — mountainside tracts of twenty, fifty, sometimes well over a hundred acres, almost all of it wooded, with elevation changes that can be dramatic given the gore's position along the Appalachian Gap corridor. Ledge outcrops and steep pitch are common, and drainages feeding down toward the Huntington River branch mean wetland and stream-corridor ground shows up on a fair number of lots. Road frontage is limited mostly to Route 17 itself or short gore back roads, and a number of parcels are accessed by rights-of-way or old logging roads rather than a maintained town road — there being so little town road to maintain in the first place. Given how much of the land is standing timber with no development pressure, Current Use enrollment is common here, which keeps the annual tax bill manageable but means any owner looking to sell for building needs to understand the Land Use Change Tax that comes due if the land is developed out of that program.

Selling a piece of land like this through a traditional agent is a tough road. The buyer pool for steep, remote gore acreage with no zoning framework and thin comparable sales is small to begin with, and a lot of that pool is looking for recreational or timber land rather than a building lot, which narrows things further. Listings here can sit for a long stretch, and once you factor in a standard commission plus the carrying costs — taxes, and potentially a Land Use Change Tax bill if Current Use status shifts — a seller can end up with a lot less in hand than the sale price suggests. That math is exactly why a direct cash purchase, with no agent, no marketing period, and no financing contingencies to wait out, tends to make more sense for gore land than the traditional listing path.

The most distinctive feature of Buels Gore is the Appalachian Gap corridor itself — the height of land where Route 17 crests between the Mad River Valley and the Champlain side of the mountains. Land near the Gap tends to be the steepest and most scenic, valued by hunters and snowmobilers who use the VAST trail network running through this stretch of mountain, but it's also the least buildable given slope and the lack of any real utility infrastructure this high up. Parcels closer to the Huntington town line tend to have gentler pitch and easier access, and those are usually the ones that draw the most serious interest from anyone actually thinking about building rather than simply holding the ground.