Long ago when I began exploring Granite State trails, I had a little point-and-shoot film camera that I carried everywhere. I have a shoebox full of prints from those early outings: evidence of an utter beginner. I didn’t know how to frame a shot. I didn’t know that it was hopeless with the fixed lens I had to get a focused close-up of a trillium in bloom. I had trouble holding the camera steady.

Even so, a few of those old prints remain special. They documented my first views of places that I later came to love. Some of those first impressions were dramatic, others much less so. I had no way of knowing that the gifts of time and memory would draw me back to certain places over and over again, seeing and learning new things with each visit.

My very first sight of the Pliny Range from the marsh near Cherry Pond was on an April day. Spring was playing hard to get. I took a photo that captured trees not yet in bud and grasses clad in the dullest of colors. Something about those hills in the distance appealed to me, though, and I wanted to capture them, too. So I snapped the shutter, heedless of the tree in the way.

Those hills enchanted me in a way I can’t explain. They invited me back as though they knew I had more to see.

That day of that first impression, I had no notion of the riot of flowers that would line that trail and surround Cherry Pond in summer. I didn’t know how autumn would transform the Pliny Range. I had yet to discover how I’d feel sitting in silence by the pond on a freezing January day with the hills hidden in low clouds. All of that lay ahead. It started for me with a dull spring day preserved in an unremarkable snapshot.

Think about a place you’ve hiked, a place that’s grown on you, maybe even snuck up on you to become a favorite. What was your first impression? Did you know when you first saw it that it would become someplace special for you? I hope you take a photo of each new trail, and don’t succumb to the siren song of the “delete” button. Some of those shots, awful though they may be, will make you smile someday. First impressions aren’t final, but they’re worth remembering.