Vermont Travel Notes

The last two days were beautiful with warm temperatures and clear skies. Today was the opposite with rain and wind all day long. Yesterday we still had a lot of colorful leaves on the trees in north central VT except along the high ridge lines. Today many of those leaves got knocked off. However, I made a trip to Burlington this afternoon and, while the spectacular scenery is gone, there still many spots of bright yellow, gold and orange on the hillsides.

This has been the best and longest lasting fall foliage season we have seen in the seven years we have lived in Vermont. I've never seen so many red trees as I did this year. One of our guests drove up to Lake Willoughby a couple of weeks ago and was still stunned and shaking his head the next day as he told us about a huge mountainside that was mostly red. He had never seen anything like it and could not even imagine such a thing if he had not seen it himself.

There will be areas of southern Vermont that are at peak now, especially in the valleys, as well as in the Lake Champlain basin. It won't last too much longer so if you want to see the best foliage period in years, you should get up here in the next week to ten days.

Honest and accurate foliage reports by state foresters are available on the VermontVacation.com website.

Why and how leaves change color is a bit complicated but if you would like to read up on it, here is a link to VemontVacation.com web page an article reprint from the U.S. Dept of Agriculture.

(c) 2007 Jeff Connor Grunberg Haus Inn