I Went to Vermont Armed With a Dark Mission. It Involved Orange Leaves and Christian Girls.

The Foliage Tracker on VermontVacation.com is active for only the six weeks between Sept. 22 and Nov. 1. It’s an algorithm of sorts, compiling years of data that documents the state’s famously Arcadian autumn shades as the air grows bitter and great streaks of orange, yellow, and inevitable brown tumble down the mountains to swaddle the state’s picturesque hamlets. Nobody, not even the best meteorological software, can predict the ebbs and flows of foliage season with total certainty, but the website did suggest that “peak leaf” this year would occur Oct. 7, late enough in the year for the bulk of the grassy chlorophyll in the leaves to break down and envelop travelers in a panorama of warm hues.

In other words, Vermont in early October is one of the prettiest places in North America. It’s also one of the busiest: In 2021, Stowe, one of the state’s most scenic towns, saw its most touristy autumn on record—with an average hotel occupancy of 69 percent, compared to 58 percent in 2019—as leaf-peepers from all over the country made their pilgrimages to witness the changing colors. The traffic they bring with them is often untenable: This year, some townships closed entire streets to keep out the interlopers.

I, of course, am part of the problem. A friend of mine decided to hold her wedding at a gorgeous Vermont ski resort during the first weekend of October—right as VermontVacation’s map began to swell with rumors of crisping leaves. It was my first trip to the state during fall, and I arrived at almost the exact same moment that the queen of foliage influencers, Caitlin Covington, was scheduled to take her infamous autumn photos.

For most of the year, the photographs Covington shares with her 1.3 million Instagram followers demonstrate an aspirational, well-heeled existence in the suburbs of her native North Carolina. Scroll through the stacks to find her draped in bridal swimwear on marshy Atlantic beaches, modeling a svelte, ergonomic stroller with her newborn, or showing off three flavors of gleaming millennial pink harvested from the clothing department of her local Target. But come September, Covington trades in those mid-South pastels for a far more rustic New England flavor as she travels to Vermont, on what influencers call a “content trip,” to capture bucolic images of deciduous splendor for her brand. Covington’s autumn photos embody a cloying, almost Kinkade-like pastoral ideal, one in which she is always front and center—skinny jeans and thigh-high Uggs, knitted caps balanced on her enameled auburn hair, sweet-scented steam floating off pumpkin spice lattes, and, of course, a bountiful swirl of crunchy, lacquered leaves filling every frame. In 2019, after being captivated by a particularly supersaturated set of Covington’s Vermont photos, a trans woman named Isabella Markel—posting on Twitter—coined the perfect term to crystalize her aesthetic: “Christian Girl Autumn.”

The name has stuck ever since; almost like a recursive meme that reappears, like Halley’s Comet, once the sun simmers into hibernation. (“As summer nears its end, her power grows,” reads one iconic riff, attached to a picture of Covington wearing a caramel pillow scarf the size of her entire torso on a sidewalk lined with the debris of fall.) For her part, Covington has embraced the meme without hesitation—leaning into her role as the harbinger of euphoric briskness. Her fall-themed Instagram posts are often emblazoned with a cheeky #ChristianGirlAutumn, and at least on some corners of the internet, her annual arrival in Vermont is given the breathless tabloid intrigue of a Kelce/Swift outing.

The reason I know all of this is because I obsessed over every element of Covington’s ensemble in the weeks before my own trip to Vermont, after my editors asked me to stage a photo shoot in the Christian Girl Autumn mold. I was to hire a professional photographer, decamp to one of the state’s many molting, timber-rich enclaves, dress in an assemblage of cornball, cosplay-ish light-outerwear, and hopefully, conjure the precise sense of wonder that keeps so many people glued to Covington’s Instagram feed, year after year.

This was going to be a tall task. As I soon discovered, the Christian Girl Autumn composition is downright Disneyland-esque, achievable only if one is willing to cook the books with some syrupy Photoshop subterfuge and stretch the truth. The other problem was more fundamentally irreconcilable; I look nothing like Caitlin Covington—or, really, any other influencer on the internet. I grew up in the perpetually seasonless San Diego and work in an industry that tends to favor the unkempt and non-photogenic. I purchased my first winter jacket in my late 20s, I’m not really a big coffee guy, and I regard the early-2010s era of Prohibition-chic revivalists—Mumford & Sons, Lady A, The Lumineers—to be the all-time nadir of pop music history. That’s why I can say, with total confidence, that there are few people on earth less attuned to the elemental joys of autumn than me.

Also, if you haven’t noticed, I’m a man. The Christian Girl Autumn aesthetic is a decidedly feminine ritual—Covington herself has been happily married for years, but when she decamps to Vermont, her husband is seldom in the picture. If I was going to pull this off, I would need to reach deep within myself and embody the sort of woman who can be rejuvenated—body and soul—by a pumpkin spice latte.

So, perhaps it was fitting that when Patricia Trafton—a high-school friend of my fiancée and lifelong Vermonter who owns an art gallery in Burlington while shooting wedding photos on the side—met me on a Saturday morning for our experiment, all of New England was drenched in rain. She had selected Oakledge Park, a rugged bit of semi-developed public land on the south end of the city, to be the site of the photo shoot, and she speculated that we had maybe an hour of coverage before the clouds opened up even wider for an untenable deluge—dooming the ambience, blurring the eyelines, and short-circuiting her very expensive camera.

The park is built on an embankment of the usually tranquil Lake Champlain, which was now foaming white and pounding against the pebbly beaches with Atlantic force. The viscous raindrops overhead were already defiling the foliage—separating leaves from their twigs, leaving them in gloppy, coagulated piles at the base of the tree trunks, destined to be further reduced into a filthy mince by foot traffic. It was bad. But Patricia is a professional, and this was not her first rodeo. Like so many other photographers in Vermont, she’s become adept at chiseling out that merchandisable, Covington-hewn autumn idyll in defiance of the natural order. Together, we would manifest Christian Girl Autumn, rain or shine.

“That girl definitely ups the saturation,” Patricia said of Covington as I slipped into my Christian Boy Autumn uniform (lumberjack flannel hoodie, sepia-toned overcoat, pleated Levi’s, cherry Doc Martens, an enormous tartan scarf that I didn’t know how to tie myself). “There are a few really simple ways to get that golden-hour look. You’re upping the warmth, you’re selectively adjusting the tint—making everything look a bit more orange. I could theoretically pull down the greens. You have plenty of options to manipulate the image.”

It’s true. Unlike their depiction in Covington’s photos, dead leaves do not glow with resplendent bioluminescence. And even during the delirious highs of peak foliage in the foothills of New England, your landscapes will be picking up plenty of dull brown. Vermont could never live up to its Christian Girl Autumn fantasies, and yet, it was still so clear that this place was beautiful. Patricia directed me to stand underneath one of the best trees in the park—still early in its changeover, plenty of green splotched with healthy yellow—and I struck my best Covington expression, utterly serene with a Stepford grin, savoring the blessings of the earth.

We exploited every loophole to manufacture the Christian Girl Autumn mystique in non–Christian Girl Autumn conditions. Patricia asked me to crouch in an unusually dense splatter of leaves, while my fiancée—just out of frame—gathered up some of the crunchy strays and dropped them overhead, hacking together a wonderland where the autumn brought with it a gentle breeze (rather than, you know, a flash flood warning).

We found a gorgeous red leaf—in rare mint condition—and re-created a classic Covington shot; holding it close to the camera’s focus, while everything in the background melded into a fuzzy russet haze. My fiancée, also from Vermont, is someone who absorbs the essence of her life force from chilly fall days. She coached me in all the requisite autumn poses that she has surely struck for her own Instagram candids over the years, desperately trying to articulate inscrutable New England motifs to the Californian she decided to marry.

“Grab both sides of your hat and make it look like you’re pulling it closer to your forehead,” she yelled, like a director, from behind Patricia’s lens. “But you have to look unflappable. Just overwhelmed by the scenery.”

She quickly Googled a photo of a poreless Covington adjusting her own knitted cap—in a gentle, model-ish way—for reference. The Christian Girl Autumn demeanor might hinge on a nauseatingly vivid aura, but as I was learning firsthand, it takes real guts to be this convincingly cringe.

The rain had scared off most of the other tourists, which spared me from one of the greatest indignations of Christian Girl Autumn photography—posing in the woods alongside the presence of others hunting down the exact same fantasy. Toward the end of the shoot, we relocated to a treehouse at the far end of the park, where Patricia coached me in one of the fundamental precepts of influencer composition: taking a slow, exaggerated walk toward the camera—one boot jutted out in front of the other—so she could capture some introspective shots that are mandatory for any autumn shoot. Just a boy in a beanie languishing in the ephemerality of coziness. I’ll never look totally comfortable in a full fall get-up—most of the winters of my life have been snowless—but for a moment or two, I did feel mesmerized by the season.

Patricia knocked it out of the park. Together, we were able to generate an effective facsimile of the lobotomized splendor so essential to Covington’s brand. Most of them were saccharine and catfish-esque in a way that felt accurate, but I was surprised to find a couple that I genuinely liked—where I look to be having fun rather than grimacing through a stunt. At last, I have pictures of myself frolicking in a pile of leaves, savoring the New England childhood I never had. I’m not on the dating apps anymore, but if I were, there’s a good chance I’d showcase my Christian Girl Autumn look at the top of my Tinder reel.

If anything was missing from our catalog, it was that we didn’t visit some of the more notorious postcard stops in Vermont, where, from the right vistas, the intense fall colors are paired with, say, a porcelain church steeple or a wondrously quaint barnyard. Those hot spots—favored by wandering foliage fetishists and further enshrined by the Instagram geotags left, like breadcrumbs, by influencers of Covington’s flock—have become a major point of controversy among local Vermonters. One ridiculously alluring farm, way off the beaten track, is now such an attraction on the Instagram junket that it’s causing legitimate traffic problems for the denizens of a little mountain town called Pomfret. It’s the most photographed barn in America—leaf-peepers block driveways or idle in the street, all for that one perfect shot. Earlier this year, the town’s government moved to close the dirt road where the farm sits, thus shutting off access to the photo op, much to the consternation of those seeking out a picture identical to the ones they saw on the internet. (The farm is private property, after all.)

Nobody understands this dynamic better than Patricia, who told me that she avoids some of the more viral arenas of Vermont, no matter how good the colors might look on film. “You pull into the parking lot at Mount Philo in autumn, and you might not see a single Vermont plate,” she said. “It’s just too crowded … and why shout out the same cidery or the same farm that everyone else posts about?”

Still, Patricia said, she remains more than capable of being innervated by the miracle of a New England autumn, despite the influx of outsiders who might ask her for photographs embracing every last one of the clichés. “It’s this brief little moment where it’s not too cold and the colors are gorgeous,” she explained. “There’s something that’s always going to be magical about that.”

I found her eternal susceptibility to Vermont’s majesty oddly heartening. After all, we’re in the midst of an ongoing tourism reckoning: Some of the greatest cities on Earth have been reduced to Renaissance-tinged amusement parks, leaving the rest of us searching, in vain, for a way to travel ethically. There isn’t a great answer; tourism has a corrosive effect on everything it touches. But Patricia could still muster some sympathy for the Californians and Floridians who are so dazzled by an autumn in New England that they’re moved to consecrate their trip in the most hackneyed way possible. It really is pretty up here, isn’t it?

I left Vermont the following Monday, under the cover of much better weather, for the six-hour drive back down to the suffocated greenery of New York City. The trees were already looking a tad more wan and threadbare than they had on the trip up north; a few plots of arid husks loomed on the ridgelines, warning of the stick season to come. There goes peak foliage, in the blink of an eye. Upon returning home, I learned that I had just missed Caitlin Covington. She arrived in Vermont the day after my trip ended. Sure enough, in the week afterward, her Instagram slowly billowed up with images of auburn leaves, cream-colored jackets, and, yes, as Patricia had warned, the same old cidery everyone seems to post about. A tradition like no other. It’s Covington’s Vermont—we’re just living in it.