We wake up the next morning in our guesthouse in Danville; it’s a dark and frosty morning outside of our bedroom windows, which are built up with condensation.. Putting on our cold-weather layers, Jane and I head outside and scrape the ice off our windshield before setting off west toward Marshfield. We return along the old railroad path to the edge of Turtlehead Pond, where a group of photographers has gathered for a sunrise shoot; Jane and I join the tripod line. It’s calm and cloudless, and the mist is rising from the lake surface into the frigid air. The photographers present appear to be part of some sort of workshop group (a guide walks down the line calling out shutter speeds and settings to everyone, which I find bizarre - a creativity-free, assembly-line vision of landscape photography). My tripod neighbors on the crowded, reedy shoreline, for their part, are friendly enough; we carefully work around each other to set up our shots. I set a timelapse of the dissipating morning fog, while using my main camera to scout for other compositions. With time, the sun comes peeking over the forest to our east, casting the nearby granite cliff in sidelight and casting a perfect golden glow on the silver birch and maple trees along the nearby shore. The light, paired with the rising mist, leads to one of my favorite shots from the entire trip (the one above).
After we have our fill of Turtlehead Pond, Jane and I get back in the car and continue southeast along the railroad bed, paralleling Marshfield Brook. This dirt road enters Groton State Forest and meets up with Hwy 232 just across the entrance from Owls Head Mountain, which Jane and I drove up one year ago. This time, we turn onto the highway and return south past Ricker Pond. In the town of Groton, we continue south along Powder Springs Road. For the morning, we will be doing a brief driving loop through several small parishes in rural Orange County, photographing some of the village-and-church scenes made famous by Arnold Kaplan, a prodigious and beloved New England photographer who pioneered many of the Vermont “scenics” that are indelibly linked to the Northeast Kingdom. After a brief stop on a hillside in East Topsham (the light is harsh and morose and the foliage past peak, so nothing emerged from this stop), we proceed a few minutes south to East Corinth. We hike up the frost-covered field to the east of the village, and I turn back to take a photograph of Jane climbing above the village and steeple. Finally, we turn west and pass through Waits River, stopping to photograph another iconic steeple composition. The foliage conditions in Waits River are more favorable, but the shot, admittedly, needed heavy clone-stamping to eliminate foreground telephone poles and wires that have been installed since Kaplan’s day.
Back on Hwy 302, we return east and then north toward the rolling farmlands of Peacham. It is mid-morning now, though the mist in the valleys is just beginning to dissipate. We take a different series of farm roads to return toward our base in Danville, stopping to photograph some beautiful country lanes lined by tall oaks and golden maples. I also scout for additional views from the vicinity of East Peacham back toward the farms and hillsides to the south, finding a beautiful spot up on East Hill. Back in Danville, we make a stop at the guesthouse before heading east to St. Johnsbury for lunch. We have a relaxed afternoon, taking a nap before heading out for a late afternoon / sunset shoot on Ricker Pond. Back on the narrow peninsula at the pond’s southern end, I have Jane pose with the foliage for some maternity shots; we take some selfies in our matching flannel shirts before calling it a night and returning to Danville.
On our final morning in Vermont, we head just a few minutes south of our guesthouse, to an overlook of Peacham that we had previously scouted on Monday afternoon. This proves to be a fruitful sunrise location; I take a mix of panoramas, distant shots of the misty hillsides overlooking the village and its iconic steeple, and a timelapse of the light suffusing the landscape in a warm, golden glow. Returning home, we pack our bags and hit the highway, following the 93S through Franconia Notch, down through New Hampshire, and back into Massachusetts. We are home in Boston before noon.
