Best year for fall foliage

 

As you’ve seen in recent posts here, 2022 has provided me with some excellent fall foliage. In fact this has probably been my best autumn for it since my early years in New York, where every fall meant great tree leaf colors. In addition to the New Mexico trip, another thing that made the autumn of 2022 such a stand-out was our visit on November 27 to Lost Maples State Natural Area about 150 miles west-southwest of Austin.  

 

 

The place is famous for its bigtooth maples, Acer grandidentatum, which in optimal years put on great color displays. When we visited in 2014 the show was pretty good but the yucky gray-white sky ruined many potential pictures for which I would have had to aim upward into the dull murk. Our 2021 trip there was worse: the maples themselves hadn’t turned colorful. On this year’s visit we finally hit it right, with brilliant yellow and orange and some red foliage, plus a bright blue sky to play those colors off against, as you see above. In the somewhat softer view below, I aimed sideways rather than partly upward.

 

  

(Pictures from the New Mexico trip will resume next time.)

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman