Vermont town shuts down road to keep out annual influencer invasion

These locals have had it with leaf-peeping pests. 

Residents of Pomfret, Vermont’s Cloudland Road have taken a stand against the annual fever pitch of fall foliage tourists by temporarily closing the most impacted road during the season’s peak. 

In recent years, the tiny town’s stunning autumnal display has become a social media sensation, and as a result the area now gets annually inundated with influencers and their ilk keen to take selfies with the beautiful backdrop — private property be damned. 

“Something had to be done,” Mike Doten, who owns an 80-acre farm on Cloudland Road, told the Boston Globe of the disrespectful internet creators who’ve begun inundating the narrow dirt road with vehicles and trespassing onto his and his neighbors’ land every fall. “It was too much.”

Doten and his neighbors are used to getting a seasonal influx of tourists looking to enjoy the colorfully changing leaves, but in the past, the visitors — mostly photographers and those staying at nearby bed and breakfasts — have been fewer and better mannered. 

While Doten described the photographers as mostly “quiet” and “don’t bother anyone” and the inn-stayers are “not so bad,” the “Tik Tockers” have gained a reputation in the past half decade for flying drones, requiring help getting their vehicles out of ditches after parking poorly on the unpaved roads and blocking the street to the point emergency vehicles wouldn’t be able to navigate if needed. 

“It’s just too crowded,” said Doten, who himself has had to pull poorly parked peepers out of ditches with his tractor on numerous occasions, the Globe reported.

Recognizing that the issue has become beyond a nuisance and is now a public safety hazard, Pomfret’s government voted this August to block Cloudland Road to all but residents for the three peak peep weeks spanning Sept. 23 to Oct. 15.

Not everyone is on board with the decision, but no one who spoke to the Globe seemed concerned about the impact the closure will have on the state’s tourism industry.