White Mountains, New Hampshire
No coffee in the room. Front office doesn’t open until eight. I walked next door to the Cambria Hotel, which had just opened a couple of months earlier, and asked the woman at the desk if I could grab a cup and pay for it at the bar. She said honey, just take one and enjoy your day. I decided I’d stay there next time.
The Golden Gables Inn was under two hundred dollars a night, which had become the standard for measuring value on this trip. Clean, a little patio, perfectly adequate for someone who was going to be outside from sunrise to dark anyway.
I drove over to the Kancamagus Highway with a plan: stop at five or six places along the route, record sound and B-roll at each one, come out with one photograph I liked from each location. Let the day be about the visuals and not about me narrating from a car.
I mostly stuck to it.
How the Kank Works
The Kancamagus Highway runs about thirty-five miles through the White Mountain National Forest between Conway and Lincoln, following the Swift River through some of the most concentrated fall color in New England. The locals call it the Kank. I was a local for the day.
I’ve been here before, a few times. A photo workshop years ago in the area. Some river work. The road is familiar in the way that places are familiar when you’ve driven them in different seasons and different light — you remember certain bends and completely forget others. I’d turned a bend I’d driven three times and thought genuinely where is this.
It was a Saturday, first week of what they were predicting would be peak color around October eleventh. Every influencer this side of the Mississippi was out on the rocks at the covered bridge. Two tour buses in the parking lot. I set up a time lapse of the chaos instead of fighting through it for the conventional shot, then pulled out the telephoto and got the bridge from a distance with nobody in the frame. That’s the shot.
The telephoto is the right tool for fall foliage anyway. Not because the wide shots aren’t beautiful but because the detail work is where the light actually lives. One backlit leaf against a dark hillside, properly exposed, with the depth of field collapsed to almost nothing. I don’t know if the image came out the way I saw it. I think it might have.
Late Afternoon
The day stretched out the way good photography days do, with the light changing every twenty minutes and keeping you on the road past the point where you meant to stop. At some point I pulled over next to a lake I’d spotted on the map thinking it would be nothing and found it doing something extraordinary — the color in the trees reflecting off the flat water in that particular way that only works when there’s no wind and the light is coming in at the right angle.
I shot handheld, end of the day, tired, and I think the images are good. There was talk on social media of an aurora that night. I noted the lake as the spot to come back to if it materialized. It didn’t. I went to dinner instead.
Morning: The Church and the Power Lines
I woke up to a sound I couldn’t identify — something had fallen or shifted in the night, rain had come in, and there was a general sense that the room had been doing something while I slept. I went out to the balcony and found the church across the street catching the first light of the morning through the fall color in the trees behind it.
Power lines. Everywhere. That specific kind of photographic frustration where you have a genuinely good scene and the infrastructure of the twentieth century has other ideas. I composed tight with the telephoto to minimize them, shot a wider horizontal version for context, and made a note to test whether Photoshop’s AI removal tool can handle a dense grid of wires over an otherwise clean scene. If it can, I’ll be impressed. If it can’t, it’s going to be a long afternoon in post.
Vermont Next
New Hampshire delivered. The Kank, the covered bridges, the church at first light, the lake reflections. I didn’t get everything I planned, but I got enough.
Vermont is proving difficult on the lodging front. Peak foliage weekend, peak pricing, and rooms I’ve been watching on Airbnb and every hotel app I have. I’m going to drive in and try to find something last minute using HotelTonight. It’s peak leaf peeping season in New England and I am driving directly into the middle of it without a reservation. This is either a great story or a terrible one.
Vermont next.
