The Trees Overhead — a stop on the Tunnel of Trees.
Since the trees are the entire attraction, it is worth knowing what is actually over your head.
This is a northern hardwood forest, and the dominant players are sugar maple and American beech. The maples are the ones that give you the scarlet and orange in October; the beeches go a soft copper-bronze and hold their leaves late — sometimes all winter, dry and pale, rattling on the branch.
Beech are easy to identify: smooth grey bark like an elephant's leg, unmistakable among all the rough-barked trees. Which is also their tragedy, because that smooth bark is irresistible to people with knives, and it is the reason you will see carved initials healed into trunks all over this country.
There is a real threat to them, too — beech bark disease, an insect-and-fungus combination that has been killing mature beech across the northeast for decades. You will see the evidence: trunks with rough cankered patches, and standing dead trees. This canopy is not guaranteed forever.
Underneath, in the gaps, you will find ironwood, striped maple with its green-and-white bark, and in wetter spots hemlock and cedar.
It is the maple that makes the show, though. And the reason the reds are so good here is the same as in Vermont: warm days and cold nights make the tree manufacture red pigment fresh in the dying leaf. A warm muggy September gives you a brown year.