Moss Glen Falls (Stowe)

Author's Comments

The drive to Stowe is the kind of drive that conditions you to expect the famous things, the church steeple, the covered bridges, the leaf peepers parked three deep on the shoulders of Route 100 in October. Moss Glen is none of that. You park on a dirt pull-off that looks like nothing in particular, and you walk a half mile through hardwood forest, and then the sound arrives before the sight does. The falls drop one hundred and twenty-five feet over ledges that have been wet for so long the moss has gone luminous. In morning light, before the sun clears the ridge, the whole gorge holds a soft blue cast and the water reads as something closer to silk than to motion. This is the hour for long exposures. A tripod, a neutral density filter, and the patience to wait for the wind to settle in the canopy above you. I have been here in early October when the maples on the ridge above the falls were at full burn, and the color came down through the gorge in pieces, caught in the spray, reflected on the wet stone. I have been here in late May when the water was loud and brown with snowmelt and the trail was a slick of mud and the whole place felt closer to wild than I had expected anything in Stowe to feel. Go early. Go on a weekday if you can. The crowds that make the rest of this town difficult in autumn have not found their way here, and the half mile of forest between the road and the falls keeps it that way.

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