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.
