Expert Optimistic for Colorful Autumn in Region
Observer Reports
Every year, as September tips toward October, the people of the Southern Appalachians and South Carolina’s Upstate wait for a kind of small miracle: the slow ignition of the forests into flame. It is never the same twice. Some years are muted—bronzes and browns washed flat by too much rain. Other years seem sharper, more alive: maple crowns burning with the unlikely clarity of a painter’s palette, sourwoods drenched in wine-colored reds.
This season has promise, despite damage from last year’s Hurricane Helene roaring through the region, bruising hillsides, cracking canopies, and toppling trees in violent scatterings that left roads closed and forests altered. And yet, this year, the autumnal color looks promising.
“So far so good,” said Don Hagan, a forest ecologist at Clemson University who has spent his career parsing the quiet dramas of southern woodlands. Hagan said that most trees managed to survive summer with their leaves intact—a small precondition, it turns out, for beauty. Drought often forces certain species to rid themselves of their foliage early, cutting short the anticipation before it can properly begin. But this year, he said, the canopy has remained, a green prelude to possibility.
The Chemistry of Color
The question of what kind of autumn we will have is not one of inevitability, but of weather’s whims. Hagan spoke cautiously, as if superstition itself could tilt the balance. The ideal: a measured descent into coolness, with just enough crisp nights to coax the pigments into action—reds deepening, yellows sharpening—uninterrupted by sudden frosts or sodden weeks of gray rain.
At higher elevations, above 5,000 feet, the first blush of peak color may already be arriving, with each drop of a thousand feet delaying brilliance by roughly a week. By early November, the lower slopes and foothills of the Upstate should be at their height, a painter’s wash stretching across the mountainsides.
But even in the science of color, there are ironies. The red flash of a dogwood leaf, the amber glow of blackgum—these are, in essence, signs of stress. Pigments surface as a tree’s response to hardship: disturbed roots, broken branches, sunlight battering through new canopy gaps torn open by the storm. A shattered forest is, paradoxically, often a more vibrant one.
The Hurricane’s Hidden Work
Hagan’s eye is not only on the present, but the future sketched within these damaged forests. Hurricanes do more than mar vistas; they redraw them. A toppled oak clears the way for saplings—sassafras, sourwood, sumac—to climb into the light. These species, hungry for sunshine, are some of the most extravagant participants in fall’s parade of color.
“As long as gaps in the canopy remain,” Hagan said, “the light and microclimate will be different. The forest changes what it shows you.”
Visitors eager to witness the transformation may have to adapt themselves. The Blue Ridge Parkway, a traditional artery for autumn tourism, still has stretches closed by debris. Travelers are urged to turn down back roads, to follow smaller routes that wind into hollows and coves where color pools unexpectedly—a reminder that beauty in these mountains is often encountered obliquely, at the margins.
Hagan, watching closely, allows himself a certain guarded optimism. The colors may be delayed, their timing not entirely certain, but the promise remains.
