The Full Spectrum

Ask tourists, locals, and anyone in the local chamber of commerce, and they’ll tell you that Autumn is the best time to visit Vermont, skiing and riding aside. Vermont, and New England generally, are justly famous for the astonishingly bright fall foliage, from electric red maples to bright yellow birches and everything in between. Despite the focus on fall, the remainder of the year is equally colorful in contrast to other places on the planet. In June, the entire landscape has a yellowish green tint to it, consistent with the pollen that seems to blanket everything. Summer varies from bright green to beige, depending on the heat. Just before the explosion of color in fall, Septembers here are a deep, dark almost luminescent green as though we can see the colors ready to burst forth. In November things turn grey and bleak once again, with only the drab browns of the tree trunks visible from a distance, soon to be covered by a clean blanket of white in our long winter.

What’s interesting about the range of color in the woods of Vermont is that ‘peak foliage’ lasts only a week or two. In the other fifty weeks of the year, the equally remarkable colors are just slow to change and we really have to pay attention to see it evolve. This April, for example, was been incredibly rainy and unseasonably cold so the mountains and valley floors have been dull, brown and dark. With the winter having been so snowy, the little bits of green, the signs of the forests coming back to life have been slow to show themselves and have only been creeping up on us a little bit at a time. Here in the first week of May, the snowbanks that have clung on under the eaves of my house have finally disappeared and the trees are finally showing some flashes of life at the tips of their fingers.

I am grateful to have plenty of down time at this time of year so I can observe and make note of the changes that make their way into my view every day – at first a trickle and soon in a rush. I’ll be headed back to New Zealand in a little over a month for another powder-filled winter in the arid landscape of the Southern Alps, but there’s plenty of time to enjoy the color spectrum in the meantime.