fall foliage

Rust on the Water: Paddling Caddo Lake When the Cypress Turn

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The put-in at Back Johnson’s Landing was still dark when we slid the canoe off the rack, and the air smelled like wet bark and something older underneath it. By the time the sky went from black to gray, steam was lifting off the water in slow columns, and the cypress closest to us had … Read more

Texas Has a Maple Season, and It’s Hiding in a Desert Canyon

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For a hundred miles along US 62/180, the country between Carlsbad and El Paso does a convincing impression of nowhere: creosote flats, gravel, the occasional Border Patrol truck kicking up dust. Then the highway tilts upward and an ancient limestone wall fills the windshield — El Capitan and the ramparts of the Guadalupe Mountains, rising … Read more

The Tree That Forgot to Stay Green: Chasing Washington’s Golden Larch Season

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The alarm went off at 4:10 a.m. in a motel room in Winthrop, and I did the math every larch chaser eventually memorizes: headlights on the North Cascades Highway by 4:45, trailhead parking lot before 6:15, or surrender the spot and hike an extra mile from the shoulder. My crew and I had timed this … Read more

Everyone Leaves Too Soon: The Buffalo River’s Second Fall

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By the last week of October, most of the country’s leaf-chasing apparatus has packed up and gone home. New England is brown. Michigan’s Tunnel of Trees has dropped its curtain. The aspen ladders of Colorado are bare sticks above twelve thousand feet. And that is precisely when I load the truck and point it toward … Read more

Twenty Miles, No Center Line: Driving Michigan’s Tunnel of Trees Through Its Strangest Fall

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The first thing you notice on M-119 north of Harbor Springs is what’s missing. No center line. No shoulder worth the name. Just two narrow lanes of asphalt slipping under a canopy of maple, beech, oak, and hemlock that closes overhead like the entrance to somewhere older than Michigan’s tourist brochures admit. My co-driver had … Read more

Cherry Season’s Over. That’s Exactly When Door County Gets Good.

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Ask ten people when to visit Door County and eight of them will say July. That’s exactly the problem. In July, Wisconsin’s Thumb — that 75-mile peninsula pinched between Green Bay and Lake Michigan — belongs to everyone from Chicago, and the line at the fish boil stretches past the picnic tables. By the second … Read more

Fall Replays Itself Every Thousand Feet: Working Colorado’s Aspen Ladder From Kebler Pass to the Bells

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The forecast said the high country around Crested Butte was flipping, so my crew and I pointed the truck west out of town before sunrise, thermoses full, headlamps still in our pockets. By the time the sun cleared the ridgeline above Kebler Pass, we understood why people drive a thousand miles for this. An entire … Read more

Rims First, Gorges Last: Timing Hocking Hills’ October Color Like a Local

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Every late September, my crew and I spread maps across the same scratched dining table and argue about October. This year the argument ended early. The vote was unanimous: Hocking Hills, the pocket of sandstone gorges an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio, that somehow still flies under the radar of leaf-season travelers who assume New … Read more