Smugglers' Notch

Author's Comments

There is a stretch of Route 108 where the road narrows and the world goes vertical. The cliffs press in close enough that you instinctively slow the car, and the light changes character entirely - cooler, greener, filtered through hundreds of feet of rock and hemlock before it reaches you. This is the notch, and it is one of those places that resists the wide photograph. I have tried. The scale does not translate. The camera flattens what the eye understands as towering, and the result always feels smaller than the experience. What works, I have found, is the detail. The boulders at the base of the cliffs are enormous and strangely shaped, fallen there over centuries, and the moss and ferns growing on them in late summer are their own small landscapes. Get close. Let the rock fill the frame. The caves among the boulders are worth the short scramble, and the light inside them shifts quickly enough that a few minutes of patience usually rewards you. Come in the morning, before the sun is high enough to reach the floor of the notch. The shadow holds longer here than you would expect, and the cool blue light against the warm rock is the photograph this place actually offers. Fall is the obvious season and the obvious season is correct - the maples up on the cliff faces turn early and burn against the gray stone in a way that does not happen anywhere else I know of in Vermont. The road closes in winter. Plan accordingly.

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