Vermont: Autumn in the Mountains

Fall foliage is upon us in New England. Now more settled into our new digs in the city, Jane and I head north to greet the season as it descends from the Canadian border. We’ve plotted a long-awaited weekend driving trip to Vermont, to wander some backroads and photograph woodlands and villages bedecked in their glorious autumn dress. After setting out from Boston before dawn, we stop briefly in New Hampshire to photograph the Franconia Range over Lafayette Brook and the morning mist rising over the valley to our northwest. The colours are astounding: tawny oaks, a sea of golden alders and elms, and crimson maples and brilliant red sumacs, standing out like individual little flames on the hillside. From Franconia, we continue north and west to the state border with Vermont. At Moore Reservoir, we leave the highway and follow Monroe Rd across the countryside, following the course of the Connecticut River and crossing over into Barnet. After half an hour of driving, we reach the little hamlet of Peacham, whose white-steepled church and outfields form a lovely scene for autumn photography. From the hillside behind the Peacham fire station, we photograph the morning light over the village before crossing the road to explore the cemetery on Academy Hill. The beautiful, stately trees surrounding the cemetery, and the sweeping, distant views beyond it to the south, form some of my favorite shots from the weekend.

After buying coffee and an apple muffin from the Peacham General Store, and two souvenir magnets and a bag of maple sugar candies from the arts co-op next door, we continue our drive across the countryside to the northwest. We stop beside another cemetery, in the Cabot Plains, to photograph a covered bridge, and proceed just a mile down the road to Burt’s Apple Orchard, where we buy a half-dozen cider donuts and a jug of apple cider. We briefly explore the farm’s corn maze and play with the rotten apple slingshot beside the parking lot before continuing on our way.

Our next stop of the morning is the top of Owl’s Head Mountain, in the Groton State Forest. During the day, a fire road leads to a car lot quite close to the mountain’s summit; we park and set off on the steep but short climb, with a bevy of other sightseers and leaf peepers. The conditions are utterly glorious for woodland photography here, with the high morning light filtering into a beautiful golden glow upon the forest floor; by comparison, the open, airy views that greet us at the mountaintop, of Kettle Pond surrrounded by foliage (though quite beautiful), are flat and lacklustre by comparison. We take in the sights and descend swiftly down the trail. My favorite images from this location (the vertical foliage scenes below) are respectively from a few steps up the trail, and from a stand of maples located literally in the center of the parking lot.

Back on the road, we continue west, stopping in Montpelier to have a lunch of Vietnamese rice and noodle soups. In the afternoon, we continue north to the little ski resort town and fall foliage capital of Stowe, encountering what could only be called a dispiriting amount of traffic (bumper-to-bumper from Waterbury all the way into the valley). Exhausted from a long morning of driving, we choose to have a relaxed evening at our inn, watching TV and going to bed early.

Vermont: The Green Mountains

The next morning, Jane and I head out early to photograph Stowe’s church at sunrise. The clouds are socked in, so the morning light is quite subdued; the church is still quite beautiful, though, against its backdrop of bronzed autumn trees and mist on the neighboring mountains. We also park in the lot behind the church and walk down Sunset Street to the trailhead for Sunset Rock - a small westward overlook across the town’s main street after short climb through the forest. The light is quite flat and miserable, so we take a few photos and selfies before descending the hillside to grab breakfast. Stowe, for all its pomp and popularity, is no larger than most of the small villages we’ve driven through in the past day; a single main street, a single traffic light intersection, and a few coffee shops, restaurants, and stores. It’s hard to imagine how crowded the area gets throughout the day in autumn, but we start to get a sense: by eight in the morning, several of the local breakfast joints have lines stretching out the doors and onto the sidewalk. Jane and I grab croissants and drinks at the nearby coffee shop and eat these on a nearby picnic bench before deciding to ignore Stowe and Smuggler’s Notch, opting instead to get out of town as soon as possible. We turn off the highway onto some backroads in Stowe Hollow, where we find beautiful, fog-laced hillsides covered with autumn foliage. But it is an easy consensus: Vermont has many scenic places, idyllic villages, and beautiful autumn landscapes. Stowe itself is far, far overrated, especially when it is a parking lot. Don’t center your photography travels around Stowe.

Heading south out of the Lamoille Valley, we turn onto VT-100, a famed driving route that cuts down the east flank of the Green Mountains. We stop to photograph Warren Falls and Moss Glen Falls, both looking beautiful against a cloak of golden foliage. Jane tries to ford the creek below Warren Falls against my advice; I have a good laugh a few moments later when she lands butt-first in the water just a few feet away from the creek bank. Further south, we have lunch at the Rochester Café and Country Store and browse the combined bookstore/café across the street, which has a wonderful collection of local memoirs and naturalist writing. Back on the road, we continue south, taking backroads to bypass Woodstock (another madhouse of foliage traffic). We spend a quiet afternoon and evening in a barn-converted-guesthouse on a farm in Reading, reading and watching movies into the night. The next morning (perhaps disillusioned by recent experience), we again choose again to ignore some of the area’s famously photographed farm scenes. We head homeward early, taking country roads overland into northern central Massachusetts and heading along Rt. 9 into Boston to avoid the pandemonium of this year’s unusually timed Boston Marathon.

New Hampshire: The Pemi Wilderness

Fall is nearly here, and from our base in Boston, it’s a fast two-hour drive to any number of beautiful places along the Atlantic Seaboard: the coast of Maine, the beaches of the Cape, the rolling hills and valleys of Western MA, and the mountainous uplands of Vermont and New Hampshire. Just over a month into our new work lives, Jane and I splurge on new backpacks and camping equipment, determined to make the most of our new surroundings. Comfortable as a clean bed and a hot shower might be at the end of a day’s travel, I’ve found car camping and hotel hopping to be severely limiting to my photographic craft, which is best done in the golden hours that bracket each day. I’ve long wanted to wake beneath the stars, miles deep within the wilderness, with pristine, picturesque landscapes a few feet outside of my tent. It’s not an experience that I’ve had any time recently in my adult life - at least not since I started photographing seriously. Until now, I haven’t had the time (or income) to make it happen.

With our new gear in tow, we set off on the second weekend of September for the northern tip of New Hampshire, to do an easy one-night camp in the Pemigewasset Wilderness (“The Pemi” for short), a massive woodland watershed that encompasses multiple ranges at the heart of the White Mountains. Setting off from Boston in the dark, we arrive at the quiet, between-seasons ski resort town of Lincoln around 7 AM, and find a parking spot up the road from the bustling trailhead parking lot shortly thereafter. Shouldering our packs for the first time, we walk several miles in along the rambling East Branch of the Pemigewasset River. Early fall colors are beginning to show here in the northern woods; along the forest canopy, the amber-red maples and golden birches are splashed among the leafy oaks and elms, and studded with pines and spruces. Morning light, that mystical, ethereal stuff of autumn magic, is filtering in through the fog and the trees. At the Franconia Brook campground, we find an empty tent platform and pitch our new tents. For relative newbies, we acquit ourselves fairly well, setting up our shelter and sleeping gear in about half an hour. After a brief snack break (nuts, bars, dried fruit), we empty our packs, stow our bear canister away in a tree hollow, and set off to explore. To reach the trails on the opposite bank, we cross the knee-high river barefoot; this winds up being a slippery, stony task that nearly ends with me face down in the water, and I vow to never again leave my water shoes behind in camp.

On the other side of the river, we walk along the Lincoln Woods Trail and climb the short path up to Franconia Falls - a series of slides where the river branch has carved its way through a slant of pink granite. Lying upon her pack, Jane takes a nap on the rocks, while I set up for long exposures of the nearby little cascades. We watch a family of school-age boys, happily tail-wagging black Labrador in tow, go plunging down the freshwater slides. In the mid-afternoon, we pack up and hike back across the river (this time I cross with my boots on, committing to their being wet the rest of the trip). Back in camp, I switch shoes and hang my boots against a tree to dry. We set up the camp boiler and heat two cups of water for our dehydrated dinners (a Mountain House breakfast skillet for me, and chicken and dumplings for Jane). In the evening, we briefly return to the riverbank to photograph the sunset light, before creeping into our sleeping bags for a long, chilly night in the forest.