STOWE, VT — A single sugar maple at the corner of Route 108 and a dirt access road behind a covered bridge has now appeared in approximately 14,000 separate Instagram carousels since Thursday morning, with photo traffic expected to peak Saturday afternoon when the light gets, as one woman in a Barbour jacket put it, “the way it gets.”
The tree, which is an entirely normal tree doing entirely normal tree things, has been roped off into a queue system after a couple from Hoboken nearly collided tripods at 7:14 a.m. Friday. A handwritten sign reading PLEASE LIMIT YOUR ENGAGEMENT SHOOT TO 12 MINUTES has been zip-tied to a neighboring birch, which is also pretty but is reportedly “the wrong orange.”
“Twenty-five bucks to park, cash only, no I can’t break a fifty,” said Doug Pelletier, who lives across the street and last September realized he could simply put cones in his own yard. “Lady this morning asked me if the tree was ‘the famous one.’ Ma’am. It’s a tree. They’re all the famous one this week.”
The maple itself has issued no statement. It is, by all available reporting, photosynthesizing.
Couples have been observed driving as far as seven hours one-way to capture an image that is functionally identical to the 13,999 images captured immediately before it, often pausing the trip only for a $19 apple cider donut at a farm stand whose Square reader has been declining cards since approximately 9 a.m. “She wanted the orange one,” confirmed Marcus Halberd, 38, of Bethesda, gesturing at his wife, who was crouched in a drainage ditch trying to get the steeple of a church into the lower-left third of the frame. “I don’t know which orange one. There’s a lot of orange ones. We’ve driven past, conservatively, six thousand orange ones.”
Local innkeepers, sensing opportunity, have implemented a $40 nightly “foliage surcharge” on top of rooms already running $610 a night, which guests are told covers “access to the view,” despite the view being a public road that anyone with eyes is permitted to look at for free. One bed-and-breakfast in nearby Waterbury is now charging guests an additional $15 to use the porch swing visible in the property’s listing photo.
Drone footage taken Saturday morning revealed a line of 64 photographers, two destination wedding parties, a maternity shoot, a golden retriever in a knit sweater, and one extremely confused man from Munich who had gotten off the wrong exit and was attempting to find a CVS.
The Vermont Tourism Board declined to comment on whether the tree has a publicist, citing only a press release noting that peak color is expected to last “another 48 to 72 hours, or until the algorithm moves on, whichever comes first.”
The maple is scheduled to drop all of its leaves by Tuesday and resume being a stick.