FAIRLEE — The Fairlee-Orford Fourth of July Parade will return after a year’s hiatus.

The Vermont Agency of Transportation, or VTrans, agreed to not close southbound Interstate 91 between exits 15 and 16 until July 14.

This will allow the parade as well as the cycle race portion of The Prouty, a fundraiser for the Dartmouth Cancer Center, to use Route 5, which serves as the detour when the southbound lanes of I-91 are closed.

Last summer, the parade was canceled and The Prouty had to forgo its 50-mile bike road race because VTrans crews closed the stretch of I-91 while trying to stabilize a rock ledge that had partially collapsed in February 2024.

“People missed it last year. It’s become something people count on. It’s become part of their festivities,” Lance Mills, a member of the Fairlee Selectboard who has participated in the parade since the mid-1980s, said in an interview.

The only other year in recent memory the parade was canceled was 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That summer, Mills built a small float and ran the parade route with it “just so I could keep our consecutive years in tact,” he said.

But his streak was broken last summer.

While organizers understood that the construction project took precedent over the parade, it still hurt to cut back on festivities.

“It’s been such a tradition,” Orford resident Ann Green, one of about a dozen residents in Fairlee and Orford who help plan the parade, said in a phone interview. “It’s missed when we don’t have it.”

Last fall, VTrans told Fairlee officials that they’d need to come back this summer to continue the work and that the Route 5 detour — which brought thousands of additional vehicles to downtown Fairlee — would resume.

The Selectboard asked VTrans to take the parade into consideration when planning its construction schedule.

“It was really important for our community,” Mills said. “They agreed to work around that.”

Around the same time, The Prouty’s organizers were having similar conversations with VTrans.

Last year, organizers were able to redesign all of its bike races except for the 50-mile race, which is the most popular option for the roughly 1,200 cyclists who participate each year, said Olive Isaacs, The Prouty’s senior director for community fundraising and engagement.

While many participants enrolled in last year’s 50-mile race decided to participate in the 35- or 77-mile routes, a couple hundred cyclists dropped out all together.

“Participants were disappointed, but were understanding,” Isaacs said in a phone interview.

This winter, Prouty organizers reached out to VTrans “just to ask if it would even be possible for a temporary pause” in construction during The Prouty, Isaacs said. “We kind of just hoped for it, to be honest.”

This spring, organizers got the news that the race could go on as planned. This year’s cycling races are scheduled to take place July 12.

“We are just so grateful,” Isaacs said.

VTrans officials talked it over with the contractors they are working with on the project and agreed to put in a provision stipulating that the southbound lanes of the interstate — and therefore the Route 5 detour — would not be in use during both events.

The work to stabilize the rock ledge that lines about a tenth of a mile of the interstate has proven to be more extensive than originally planned, Bruce Martin, VTrans project manager, said in an interview.

“We know the situation that everyone was in last year and we really don’t want to have to go through that again,” Martin said. “We try to accommodate events like this when we can. Obviously (...) last year, we were dealing with an emergency situation and we had to act.”

The roughly $13.2 million project is now expected to be completed this November.

The six-mile stretch of I-91 South between the two exits will likely be closed for seven weeks from July 14 until the end of August. There will also be rolling roadblocks on northbound I-91 as part of the project.

“It is the largest rock cut in the state,” he said, adding that the ledge is as tall as 400 feet in some places, which makes the work more complicated.

This year, mesh installed over the rock face in the late 1990s will be removed and replaced with a more durable material.

VTrans officials will hold a virtual public meeting about the project at 5 p.m. on June 25. A link to the meeting can be found at fairleevt.gov.

This year’s parade is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. on July 4 on Route 25A in Orford, cross the bridge over the Connecticut River that connects the two communities, and continue on to Route 5 in Fairlee, where it ends in a field.

After the parade, there’s a takeout chicken barbecue; fireworks are scheduled at about 9 p.m. over Lake Morey.

The theme of this year’s parade is “Celebrate the Red, White & Blue,” which was supposed to be the theme in 2024 before it was canceled. Organizers never truly know how many people will participate because they don’t require participants to register ahead of time.

“As long as it’s tasteful, you’re in,” Green said.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.