When I was a teenager in the 1970’s, I worked summers at the Triple A travel agency in Richmond, Virginia. I was reminded of this experience by a recent conversation regarding fall foliage.
In my day, long before the advent of the internet, before Google Maps Lady was even a glint in a rich man’s eye, there were TripTiks. TripTiks were my job. When someone wanted to take a road trip, they would come to my counter and tell me or one of the others where they wanted to start, where they wanted to end up, and what they wanted to see in between. I would then go to an enormous wall that contained many pigeonholes, each housing multiple copies of a certain strip of American highway. I would select all the applicable strips, bind them together, and trace the ongoing route with green highlighter. Thus, the traveler would have a handy booklet to flip through, with exits, road numbers and points of interest clearly marked.
A very popular request among these customers was a trip along the eastern seaboard in September or October, for the express purpose of seeing the famous fall colors of the Eastern hardwood forests. These colors were and are justifiably famous, spanning almost the entire visible light spectrum and many shades in between.
Recently I spent a month of late-summer-early-fall in the western Interior of Alaska, and I heard someone mention the boring monochrome of the Alaska fall colors. So, I looked a little more closely. Now, I grant you, in my beautiful, beloved Southeast the forests are a practical sort, being almost entirely evergreen, and apparently choose to waste no energy on baroque finery. But what about their northern cousins, the taiga forests of the Interior? Maybe they like to show off just a bit?
Well, it is true that the fall colors in even this part of Alaska are more muted than you’d find back East. But if you take a closer look, you will see the unchanging dark green of the spruce mingled with every imaginable shade of yellow to gold to reddish gold, what with the aspens, birches, poplars, and willows. Add to that a scarlet splash here and there of highbush cranberry leaves, and you have a subtle beauty that just might get under your skin and stay there.
You be the judge.
Here’s a science thought. As you go towards higher latitudes you tend to get less species diversity in the floral and faunal assemblages. You get fewer species but large numbers of the species that are there. For instance, I was scanning photos yesterday of a float down the Yukon River that ended on October 3, 1986 around Holy Cross. There were September photos of slopes along the river covered by golden hardwoods. But all the trees were the same species. There was a lack of contrasts and accents. So the eye-catching qualities, the multi-colored diverse mix of species was not there, and to the human eye the scene seems a little flat and perhaps drab. I was looking at some other photos from that trip, a side trip at the end of August to a camp on the banks of the Koyukuk River upstream of Hughes. The nights were below freezing by that point in the late summer, and it was feeling like fall. The fall colors that caught my eye were in the ground vegetation surrounding the bogs. There were bright red cranberries, bright blu blueberries, vividly orange, red, and brown mushrooms of many varieties. It was just a matter of adjusting the scale of observation. And then of course there are the crimson landscapes of of the mid-altitude caribou range, Denali foothils, and the like. Those are dramatic in September. I think, in terms of an easily accessible, Sunday drive, leaf-peeper opportunity Alaska is generally a not the ideal destination. But that is not because Alaskan falls are drab.
So true. I think the most striking fall vista I have seen to date was a mountainside above Eklutna Lake, north of Anchorage. The lowest level was golden hardwoods; the middle band was scarlet tundra, and above that was fresh snow.
I thought to write a poem inspired by your essay. But no, you have already done it! Pure poetry.
Thank you, sister, for your kind words.
Beautiful!!
Thank you.