Stowe, Vermont

I came into Stowe on Route 100 from the south and there is no other road that prepares you for that approach. The highway runs through a valley corridor between ridgelines and in the second week of October every hillside was doing exactly what October hillsides are supposed to do in Vermont — burning amber and red and a deep impossible orange that the photographs afterward never quite capture, because the photographs don’t have the smell of cold air and the sound of the Waterbury River below the road and the light moving through the canopy from a sun already low in the sky. I pulled over twice in the first mile. I’d been in New England long enough to know this was not embarrassing.

Stowe village sits in the valley below Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak, and the relationship between the mountain and the town is the central fact of the place. In October you are aware of the mountain as a presence above everything, the ridgeline dramatic and close, the ski trails visible as clearings in the trees. In January the mountain is the only reason anyone is there, and the village arranges itself accordingly: ski shops and boot rentals and the particular warmth of restaurants full of people who have been outside in hard cold all day. I was there in fall, and the mountain was in its transitional state — the chairlifts stopped, the snowmaking equipment idle, the trails walking routes instead of ski runs. I hiked the Long Trail to the summit ridge on a Thursday and met no one.

The farmstead dairy I visited sits on a small road east of the village, the kind of road that Google Maps expresses mild concern about in wet weather. The operation was modest — maybe fifty cows, a small aging cave behind the barn — but the cheese was anything but. They made a sharp cheddar aged eighteen months that crumbled on the knife and tasted of grass and time and something mineral I couldn’t identify, and a soft washed-rind wheel that smelled alarming and tasted extraordinary. The woman running the tasting room had worked there since she was sixteen. She described the aging process the way a sommelier describes a vintage: specific, affectionate, knowledgeable in a way that had clearly cost her a lot of years. I bought as much as my cooler would hold.

The Stowe Recreation Path runs from the village out toward the mountain along the West Branch River, and in fall it is one of the most quietly beautiful walks I have taken anywhere. The path passes through maples and past covered bridges and alongside the river, which is fast and clean and makes a sound that I found myself timing my steps to. The tourist infrastructure in Stowe is real — the inns and the restaurants and the resort — but the path reminded me that all of it exists in the context of a specific valley with a specific mountain above it, and the valley was here long before any of the hotels.

When to go: Late September to mid-October for foliage; peak color typically hits Stowe in the first week of October. January through March for skiing on Mount Mansfield. Both extremes are worth the trip — the shoulder seasons (November, April) are the ones to avoid.