Mount Mansfield via Toll Road

Author's Comments

There is something disorienting about arriving at four thousand feet by car. You step out of the vehicle and the air is thinner, cooler, the wind already telling you that you have crossed into terrain that does not entirely belong to Vermont as you know it. The toll road delivers you near the ridge and from there you walk. The Chin is a mile and change over rock that looks more like Labrador than New England, and the alpine plants underfoot are older than anything else you will see that day. I come up in late September when the valleys below have turned and the ridge itself has gone to bronze and rust. The view is enormous and slightly hard to compose. You can see into four states and a Canadian province on a clear afternoon, and that abundance is the problem - too much horizon, not enough anchor. I have learned to wait for golden hour, when the light starts to rake across the ridge itself and the foreground rock takes on dimension. That is when the photograph finds its weight. The distant ranges go blue and the near stone goes gold, and the layering does the work that a flat midday view never can. Stay on the trails. The vegetation up here is the kind of thing that takes decades to recover from a single boot in the wrong place. Bring more layers than you think you need. The summit is colder than the parking lot by a margin that catches people off guard every time.

Gallery