Autumn blazes across the flanks of Mt. Marcy as a dusting of early snow caps the Adirondacks' highest peak — a chrome-era natural-color photograph that catches the fleeting overlap of two seasons above a weathered farmstead in the valley between Keene and Keene Valley, New York. The rustic gray-board barn and outbuildings anchor the foreground while a forest of orange, crimson, and gold sweeps upward toward the snow-line, the John Brooks hiking trail invisible but implied in the drama of the terrain. William Coughlin's lens captured this scene for Mike Roberts' Berkeley, California studio, and in July 1963 someone named John (traveling with a companion called Bib) mailed it from Moriah Center, NY, to an aunt named Nell in Worcester, Massachusetts — tucking a breathless road-trip bulletin inside: a loop through New Hampshire, Maine, and Canada, now turning south toward Lake George.