Upper Valley residents have a love-hate relationship with “leaf peepers,” but like most rural New Englanders, they understand the vital role tourism plays in the region’s economy.
Visitors to the Upper Valley tend to plan their trips during this time of year, when red and yellow trees provide the perfect photo backdrops and the frost has yet to arrive. These foliage enthusiasts contribute significantly to the region’s economy, but they only show up for a few weeks each year. Researchers say locals need to diversify the Upper Valley’s tourism economy so revenues don’t end when the leaves disappear.
“It’s peak fall foliage season, and there are a lot of communities where there’s a lot of traffic and people parked places where they shouldn’t be, and a lot of local frustration because of that,” said Jada Lindblom, an economist at the University of New Hampshire. “But the reality is, that’s a two- or three-week window in most places.”
Take the Cloudland Road problem: Between 2021 and 2022, visitors started crowding two roads in Pomfret so frequently that community members proposed temporary closures to their selectboard.
Tourists are eager to see Cloudland Road’s Sleepy Hollow Farm, with its made-for-movie name and rustic red farmhouse, and locals worried emergency vehicles would run into roadblocks if they needed to pass through. So in 2023, Pomfret began seasonally closing Cloudland Road and making the perpendicular Barber Hill Road one-way.
Since then, the closures have become routine, but Benjamin Brickner, the chair of Pomfret’s selectboard, said the town hopes to stop doing them eventually.
“The hope is that there will be a declining interest and awareness of that one particular house, and so eventually we can go back to normal, and we won’t have a resurgence of the issues that we were trying to address in the first place,” Brickner said Tuesday.
Limiting tourism in general was not the goal when the Pomfret select board voted for these road closures; on the contrary, it was a community concern. Pomfret residents wanted to divert traffic off of Cloudland Road, but they worried about discouraging visitors from an area that relies on tourist revenue for much of its economy. The opposite happened, however: Closing the road drew even more attention to the Upper Valley town, and tourism, rather than dwindling, grew.
Cloudland Road is one example of a common phenomenon in rural areas, according to Lindblom. She joined researchers from the University of West Virginia, Penn State University and the University of Vermont in a study on tourism and quality of life in the Upper Valley for the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development.
Their study found that the region’s tourism needs diversification, since it’s currently concentrated within two or three weeks in the fall. While restaurants, inns and other small businesses thrive for that short period, they see little action at other times of the year.
In an interview with the Valley News, Lindblom said, “From an economic development standpoint, the importance of tourism can be to help balance out some of those fluctuations, so that you have visitors coming more times of the year, maybe in shoulder seasons when they haven’t typically visited in the past.”
She also stressed that people outside the Upper Valley are often unfamiliar with it. They know about Dartmouth, and maybe its hospital system, but they don’t see it as a top destination, especially not outside of foliage season. In a survey conducted as part of the study, out-of-town visitors reported that the Upper Valley could benefit from more advertising.
Jim Kelly has been thinking about this very thing. The director of Woodstock’s chamber of commerce has no qualms about fall tourism in his part of Vermont — he said just under 5,000 people came by his desk at the Visitor’s Center last week.
“It’s been chaos, but we love the chaos,” Kelly said.
When the trees turn red, tourists follow. But when the leaves disappear completely, and the ground turns to mud, Woodstock has a harder time attracting visitors. Kelly and his team at the chamber of commerce are trying to curb this problem by marketing the town to people in nearby communities. They recently launched “Woodstock Wednesdays,” an effort to boost commerce in town by offering raffle tickets to shoppers.
“If you do have visitors that know about you and love coming back again and again, that can be a really important strategy for keeping local economies vibrant,” Lindblom said.