Thompson Travelers

We came a long way for this scenic mountain drive along country roads to see the legendary fall colors. This journey through the New England region spans across several states, the brightest and boldest colors happening here in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and into Vermont.

During the spring and summer, the trees are in their growth cycle, manufacturing chlorophyll, which gives leaves their green color. As the fall weather approaches, with shorter daylight and cooler temperatures, the trees stop making chlorophyll, and the green color disappears revealing all the reds, yellows, and oranges. It’s so colorful, it hardly seems real. I just want to pick up all the leaves and decorate my house with all this color!

The trees directly exposed to sun turn red, while those in the shade may be yellow. As the sun provides a spectrum from warm to cool, as the winds blow gently or in strong gusts, as the clouds provide filtered sunlight, gentle mists, or a cloudburst downpour, there is no predicting when the fall foliage will be at its peak since all of these factors influence when the leaves will change their colors.

Our tour guide tells us if we were a couple of weeks earlier, we would have been in a forest of green. If we were two weeks later, this would have been a stick tour, with all the leaves on the ground. We are hitting it at its peak…aren’t we lucky!!

There are only two places in the world that have this explosion of color of the fall leaves: New England, and part of Japan. It’s only a short window from mid September to late October.

The foliage goes on for miles and miles, and it’s hard to capture just how truly beautiful and magnificent all this color is. Photos just can’t capture the grandeur of it all. It’s so expansive, wide, and tall in all directions and my little camera just doesn’t do it justice. Shooting photos from a moving vehicle makes for a little blur in the my photos. The colors are slightly off because the windows of our vehicle are lightly tinted and there’s little glass glare, but it’s still an unbelievable, magnificent show of the explosion of color all through these mountains.

They certainly know how to celebrate the coming of fall back here…

Here’s just a little sample of driving down the roads surrounded by this beautiful fall foliage. It’s breathtakingly beautiful and so rich in color and diversity that it doesn’t seem real, yet there it is for miles and miles. My youtube video just doesn’t keep the colors as rich and vibrant as they really are, but at least you get the idea…