Fall is officially here, though if you look out at the hills right now, you might not believe it -- the Upper Valley itself is still mostly green while higher ground to the north is already turning. This week we get into why, and when to actually expect color here. Plus Dartmouth's Family Weekend fills Hanover, the Shaker Harvest Festival returns to Enfield, and Sweetland Farm's fall festival and benefit 5K takes over Norwich.
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Farmers’ Markets
West Hartford Library Farmers Market wrapped up its season in mid-September. Lebanon, Norwich, Mt Tom, Canaan, Royalton, Honey Field Farm, and Market on the Green in Woodstock are all still running.
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This Week in the Upper Valley
The Upper Valley Is Fashionably Late to Fall
Look out at the hills around the Upper Valley right now and you'll see mostly green, maybe a maple or two starting to blush at the edges. That's not the season running late -- it's that this part of the Valley sits near the back of the line, and there's a real, physical reason why.
The color itself isn't new growth -- it was there all along. As days shorten and nights cool, trees stop producing chlorophyll, the pigment that makes leaves green and that's been masking the yellows and oranges (carotenoids) underneath all summer. Reds work differently: they're actively produced, and only show up strongly when a run of sunny days pairs with cool, frost-free nights. That combination is what makes some falls brilliant and others muddy and brown -- it's not really about calendar timing, it's about the weather in the weeks right before.
Elevation does most of the remaining work. Color moves down a mountain at roughly a day and a half per hundred meters, which means a ridge and the valley floor below it can be two weeks apart even in the same town. That's why the Northeast Kingdom and the higher elevations of the White Mountains -- the Kancamagus, Franconia Notch -- are already showing real color right now, while Connecticut River valley towns like Norwich, Hanover, and Woodstock, sitting at just a few hundred feet, are still mostly green.
So when does it actually arrive here? One forecasting model puts peak color at Woodstock's Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park around October 12, and statewide Vermont peak is centered around October 5, with valley towns typically running toward the later end of that window. On the New Hampshire side, the state's own tracker estimates peak lands around October 11 across most of the state, ranging from early October in the higher country to mid-October in the lower Merrimack and Connecticut valleys.
Both states run their own trackers through the season if you want to keep watching as the weeks go on: Vermont's Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation publishes a weekly report written by actual foresters, and New Hampshire's VisitNH runs an interactive Foliage Tracker updated twice a week. Neither is a guess dressed up as certainty -- both get corrected against real ground reports as the season moves.
If the mechanics of what's happening in the canopy interest you, Howe Library in Hanover has a free talk next Thursday on a related and more sobering piece of the same story: the decline of ash trees across New England forests, and what it means for the tree diversity that gives fall its range of color in the first place.
