NEW ENGLAND FALL FOLIAGE

Welcome to NewEnglandTimes.Com's New England Fall Foliage Guide!

Navigation
You'll notice that the menu at left lists all of the things to be seen and done during the New England fall foliage season, by state. We have a broad section through which to navigate, but there's a lot going on in the fall, so we wanted to make sure you had all the information you need to come on up and have the time of your life.

Trip Planning Page
After you've got all the New England fall foliage information you need, this detailed guide takes you step-by-step through the planning process of a New England fall foliage trip. It will give you all of the information you need to make a decision about where to find the most colorful New England fall foliage and put together a great trip plan. It has all of the nuts and bolts to help you prepare for your New England fall foliage vacation. Here, too, are tips and ideas we've accumulated over many fall foliage seasos. We're sharing them with you to make sure you have a great trip, but also to suggest that you know what to look out for and where the New England fall foliage is best. They'll help make your stay better and your wallet a bit heavier than anticipated. Above all, come on up to escape the chaos and enjoy the peacefulness, color, fragrances, foods, as well as the places to go and things to see and do on the perfect New England fall foliage excursion.

Attractions in Each State
Once you've decided where you'd like to go, we offer the Attractions Section for each state in our New England fall foliage guide, which is loaded with a wide range of different activities. These include everything from picking your own apples to corn mazes to whale watching to taking the Alpine Slide at one of the ski resorts.

This New England fall foliage guide for each state is particularly helpful if the trees are shedding leaves early. We want to give you something else to do in addition to taking in the colors or if the peak is past. The idea is to help you navigate around disappointment at all costs.

Whether you go alone or with others, you'll find yourself amply awed by the colors of the unique New England fall foliage, which rivals that of fall foliage almost anywhere else in the world, the sites and different places to visit, agritouring, corn mazes and a wide range of other fascinating places to see and things to do.

If you’d like to participate in the autumn harvest, fall and apples have been soul mates since the birth of the myth of Johnny Appleseed wandering the whole the region casting his seeds as he went. Pick your own pumpkins or berries and try to negotiate your way through a corn maze.

Tours Section in Each State
This offers you a variety of day-trip tours that will take you not only through incredible fall foliage countryside and flora, but you might just see some fauna, too. Fall is the rutting season. That it coincides with hunting season, which makes deer and moose a bit skittish, but you might see deer, moose or a bear, the latter of which will be gorging itself for winter hibernation during the fall foliage season.

Before You Go! Great Resource When Preparing for Chilly Fall Foliage Tours WearevertheWeather.com, Fashion Forum: What to Wear in New England: Fall Foliage Tour

Lodging in Each State

We also offer our rapidly growing NewEnglandTimes.Com Main Lodging Section. There you'll find more B&B inns, spas and resorts that are all the better during the New England fall foliage season.

However you choose to enjoy this annual spectacle, you won’t be disappointed. But… keep in mind that New England foliage season is a busy time of year, so you need to start planning and making arrangements as soon as you can.

Each state is represented by a link. Click on it and you'll be wisked to a list of towns in that state. Once there, click on a town, and hotels, B&B inns and spas and resorts will appear. You can learn about each and book a room right then and there.

Color Change
This page explains how scientists believe the colors change to give us the annual spectacle of a New England fall foliage season and how rich it will be, why some are trees are yellow and others red, and why they change completely differently. It's an interesting explanation of prevailing theories.

Preserve a Leaf
This gives you instructions about how you can pick particularly elegant fall foliage leaves and turn them into beautiful keepsakes, gifts, or the components of a collage of leaves that not only retain their textures, but their colors, as well.

Peak Tracker
This is a map that tracks New England fall foliage peaks and will keep you posted on the progress of color changes. As we get into October, the colors will begin to appear and then spread somewhat rapidly. However, this year, the New England fall foliage may come a bit sooner.

The Photo Gallery

The photo above is a compilation of different layers of the exact same leaf. The first was brought into Photoshop and the layer duplicated many times over. Each layer was made a different color and rotated to make it appear as if there are many different leaves. But they are all the same one, The NewEnglandTimes.Com logo.

We get lots of requests for New England fall foliage trip ideas. Unfortunately, we can’t do itineraries, but if you have questions or would like to share your impressions of the fall foliage season, please send an email to jim.hyde@newenglandtimes.com.

Also, we get a number of requests to make reservations for New England fall foliage trips, but we do not have an inn or hotel of our own, so you can use the "Book a Room in New England Now" box above to make reservations.

We really hope that this New England fall foliage guide will help you plan for fall activities that give you a trip to remember fondly whether you come up here or stay home and take your New England getaway or New England vacation by mousing through the pages of this fall foliage getaway and vacation guide. Please let us know what you'd like to see in next year's Special New England Fall Foliage Section so we can improve on what we've started. Please email me with your comments at: jim.hyde@newenglandtimes.com. We'd really love to hear from you.

In short, trying to predict when the fall foliage peak will arrive, how colorful it will be and how long it will hang around are all variables that simply can't be forecast with any great degree of accuracy. Regardless, New England fall foliage is an annual spectacle that has been a crowd-puller for New England for generations.

So far, in Northern Vermont and New Hampshire, the conditions exist to make this year’s New England fall foliage season a blindingly bright, spectacular display worthy perhaps of being the eighth wonder of the world.

There are very encouraging signs that the trees have been taking stock of weather conditions and conferring about when each genus should start cutting off the chlorophyll that greens their leaves and spring into the full-blown New England fall foliage season.

When they do, stark yellows, oranges, reds, magentas and gold, just might bring extra color to Mother Nature’s paintbrush this year.

The evergreens too have a role to play. They comprise a different kind of botanical phenomenon. They add to the New England fall foliage splendor as green patches punctuating the deciduous-tree countryside around them.

Most people believe that evergreens are pine and fir trees only. Yet they include such genuses as Rhododendrons, Laurel, Mountain Laurel and other like flora, as well. Some genuses actually do shed leaves and pine needles every few months or every few years as new leaves and needles grow constantly.

Discerning the Essence

For my wife Terry and I, the New England fall foliage season has been our season of choice for 33 years, whether the colors have been brilliant and mesmerizing or muted and dull. But this devout affinity has been contagious for centuries.

We’ve tried without luck to capture and understand the essence of exactly what makes us so enamored of this frustratingly short fall foliage season. That we first met in the fall has something to do with it, but we both loved it before then.

Beside the colors, perhaps it’s the autumnal perfume comprising the fragrances of birch, maple and oak smoke rising from chimneys mixing with the heady scent of the last cutting, and fresh, chilly air that ushers in the New England fall foliage season.

Or maybe it’s the anticipation of soon folding ourselves into comfortable chairs, steaming coffee in one hand, a good book in the other as snow, deep and sparkling, piles up outside. Certainly the coziness of a down comforter on a cold, fall foliage night is a romantic factor.

Obviously, New England comprises a massive amount of territory, and, for those of us who have chosen to cover the region, confronting us is the prickly task of trying to divine exactly when the foliage peak will arrive and how long it will stay. The unknown makes it hard to help you plan your ideal fall foliage getaway. That's especially so with Mother Nature's whimsical and mischievous sense of humor. She cares not that, to the region, New England fall foliage brings the most people.

We've done our best to give you as much information as possible to understand interact with fall foliage and enjoy it as much as Terry and I, and millions of others do each year.

This special New England Fall Foliage guide offers a great deal of information to help you carefully scope out a great leaf-peeking safari.

We wish you all the best and sincerely hope that you have a truly beyond-expectation New England fall foliage season this year.

Disclaimer: While we have made every effort to give the most accurate directions to the various locations we can in each state tour by checking with Google maps, the latest state maps, books about each state and our own experience, we cannot be held responsible if street names have been changed, if construction is on-going on any route, or routes have changed. We strongly advise you to take a current map with you on any New England fall foliage tour or trip.