Every autumn a wave of color starts in the Yukon and takes twelve weeks to reach the Gulf. Drag the date, or press play, and watch it roll south over the continental United States and Canada. Press the location button and the map will find you in the season.
This is a model of a normal year, built from latitude, elevation, distance to the coast and forest type, and drawn at the scale of a continent. It is not a live report. Real seasons run a week or two early or late with the weather, and a single valley can be a week off its neighbor. Use it to see the shape of the season, then check a local source before you drive.
Autumn is a wave, not a date
Most foliage maps color each state a flat block and call it a forecast. That’s tidy, and it’s wrong in a way that matters if you’re planning a trip. Color doesn’t respect borders. It follows latitude, it follows elevation, and it stalls near the coasts, where the ocean keeps the nights mild. So we built the map as a surface instead of a patchwork. Every point on it has its own peak date, and the color you see is where that point sits in its own cycle on the day you’ve chosen.
Two things set the timing. Shortening days tell a tree to stop making chlorophyll, and cold nights speed the change. The further north or the higher up a tree stands, the sooner both arrive. That’s why the wave starts in the boreal forest and the high Rockies in early September, crosses New England and the upper Midwest in the first half of October, and doesn’t reach the Ozarks, the Blue Ridge foothills or the Texas Hill Country until November, weeks after Vermont is bare.
The colors are honest too. Sugar maple country peaks red. Aspen country peaks gold. The Southeast, with its oaks and hickories, goes bronze and russet and takes its time. The plains and the deserts barely change at all, which is why they stay quiet on the map. That’s forest, not a rendering error.
Press the location button and the map will place you on it, with your own estimated peak and where you sit in the season today. The Borders button lays state and country lines over the color if you want them, and hides them if you’d rather see the continent the way a satellite does.
One continent, five different falls
The map paints each region with its own palette because each region really does turn a different color. Here’s what the wave looks like on the ground.
The boreal north
Early to mid SeptemberAspen, birch and tamarack across the Yukon, northern BC, the Prairies’ parkland and the Canadian Shield. Almost pure yellow, fast, and over in two weeks. First to turn, first to drop.
The mountain west
Mid September to early OctoberAspen groves in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and the Sierra, plus larch in the Cascades and the Kootenays. Gold against dark conifers. Elevation sets the date, so the high basins go a week before the valleys.
The maple belt
Late September to mid OctoberNew England, the Adirondacks, southern Quebec, Ontario’s cottage country and the Great Lakes uplands. Sugar maple red, the most saturated color on the continent. Peaks north to south over about three weeks.
The heartland
Mid to late OctoberThe Mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley, lower Great Lakes and the Ozarks. Maple, oak, hickory and sassafras together, so orange dominates with red and bronze mixed in. Longer season, softer peak.
The late south
Late October through NovemberThe Blue Ridge foothills, the Piedmont, the Deep South and Texas. Oaks and hickories in bronze, russet and wine, with sweetgum and black gum providing the reds. The last color in North America, often into Thanksgiving week.
Twenty-nine places, in the order they turn
These are the destinations we keep coming back to, with the peak date the model gives each one. The dot matches the color on the map for the day you’ve selected above, so scroll up, change the date, and the table follows.
| Place | Where | Estimated peak | What you’ll see |
|---|
Chasing the peak is the wrong strategy
Peak is a single week, and the week moves. Plan a trip around it and you have maybe a one in three chance of hitting it. Plan around the slope instead. Pick a route that runs north to south, or high to low, and drive it over four or five days. Somewhere along it the color will be perfect, and the rest of the drive shows you the before and the after, which is the part most people never see.
A few routes that do this well: the Cabot Trail down through Nova Scotia’s highlands to the coast; Quebec’s Route 138 from Charlevoix into the Laurentians; Vermont’s Route 100 top to bottom; the Blue Ridge Parkway, which drops nearly 5,000 feet between its highest point and its southern end and can hold color for a month; and Colorado’s Highway 82 over Independence Pass, where you can watch the aspen line move down the mountain in an afternoon.
We wrote about a few less-crowded options in Six Places Where Autumn Is Still (Somewhat) a Secret. If you’re after the science of it, the pigments involved are carotenoids and anthocyanins, and the Glossary of Visual Culture is where we keep the vocabulary for color itself.
About the map. The foliage surface is a model we built for this piece. Peak timing follows latitude (about three days earlier per degree north), elevation (roughly three and a half days earlier per 1,000 feet), and proximity to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which delay color. Forest type sets the palette and how long color lasts. The base geography comes from Natural Earth and the U.S. Census Bureau via the open us-atlas and world-atlas packages. The map does not use live observations, so treat every date as a normal-year estimate with a margin of about ten days. Your location, if you share it, is used only in your browser to place a marker; it is never sent anywhere.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
