Instagram-Worthy Valley Views
We live in a beautiful place. At the same time, it can be hard to capture the full wonder of the views around us, especially when it comes to those places that are nearer to moments – quiet corners of a backroad, say, with the murmur of fall breezes and falling leaves. If you need that Instagram-worthy photo, though, there are some must-visit spots.
Possibly the most iconic view of the Valley can be had in South Deerfield. It’s there that the Mount Sugarloaf summit house rests high above the small “downtown” of the village. Climbing up the several paths that lead to the summit offers two big surprises for first-timers. The first is that the summit house, which looks like one of those mid-century mansions perching in the hills above Los Angeles, is actually quite small. It’s really a platform with a sidecar of a tower containing a winding staircase. Climb to the very top of the summit house, and you get the second nice surprise: the far side of Mount Sugarloaf plunges a lot farther down than the climb from the parking lot, and offers a sweeping vista from the Sunderland bridge across the Connecticut River all the way down to the towers of UMass Amherst and the distant hills of the Seven Sisters in the Holyoke Range. There’s a reason this view has graced postcards for as long as there have been photographs.
Farther south is something of a bookend – the other prominent Valley summit house, atop Mount Holyoke in Skinner State Park, just across the river from Northampton in Hadley. It’s a bit more of a hike to get to that summit house, and the house itself is a more sizeable edifice. Its view is much like what you get in Deerfield, punctuated in high style by the meandering Connecticut River, and offering rolling farmland and distant peaks to the west and north.
At the northern end of the Valley, there’s a sight that’s as rewarding looking up as it is looking down. You can climb up into the Poet’s Seat tower that overlooks Greenfield, and its more modest elevation offers a nice view, but one less bucolic, since it’s in a town proper. But if you visit the park that stretches below it, there’s something majestic about that nearly castle-like structure sitting atop its hill. Every summer, it’s the site of impressive fireworks, too. And in case you’re wondering – there really was a Greenfield poet who’s associated with the Poet’s Seat tower. His name was Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, and though he didn’t reach the heights of fame of Amherst resident Emily Dickinson, he did pen plenty of verse, and was a fan of the ridge where the tower was built in 1912. The Greenfield Library has long hosted the Poet’s Seat poetry contest, and the winner gets custody of an actual “poet’s seat” chair until the next year.
There are many great Valley views, but for iconic, start with these.
