Fall foliage in New England may come early this year

Leaf peeping season might arrive ahead of schedule this year. 

An updated fall foliage forecast from Yankee magazine is predicting that the lack of rainfall in most of New England over recent weeks will affect the timing and peak of the season. 

The magazine’s foliage expert, Jim Salge, wrote that he expects peak color to arrive earlier and that more of the region will turn all at once. With the drought, he said, he also expects that the show of color will be shorter-lived. 

“We saw this pattern in 2020, another drought year, but a dry spell this long and late is completely unprecedented, so we don’t have any past years to compare it to,” he wrote in the magazine. “It’s a shame, as this year was so close to working out perfectly. We need weather like we’ve been having to bring out the best colors, but the lack of rain has been too much.”

Typically, he said, higher elevations in the northern states usually reach peak first by late September, with the trend working downhill and southward and then to the coast as the weeks roll on. 

“This year again, though, we anticipate things to be a bit ahead of schedule,” he said. “Because the wave of color takes so long, visitors may miss peak color at any one location but rarely miss seeing some peak color during their trip to New England. Plans may just have to shift either earlier or southward.”

What hasn’t changed with his forecast, he said, is that Western Massachusetts, central Vermont, and the western White Mountains in New Hampshire are still looking like the best places to catch particularly spectacular color, since those areas have had the best weather setups over the spring and summer. 

On X, Salge wrote that the season has already started, with foliage beginning to change in northern New England.