Where to see fall colors in the Sierra and at home
Festive fall foliage is beginning to brighten the slopes of the mighty Sierra Range and is coming soon to your own city and nearby vineyards. Here are suggestions for nearby road trips for colorful scenery and exciting exploration.
California Fall Color Editor John Poimiroo, notes that “New England may get the rave reviews, but California has both the ecology and the landscapes for spectacular color. California is unique among our 48 contiguous states, with elevations ranging from well above 10,000 feet to sea level and diverse eco-zones, making our state the colorful leader in autumn visual wonders.”
Poimiroo’s website, californiafallcolor.com (which just landed a Lowell Thomas travel award for national travel blogs) provides inspiration and predictions for fall color tracking from September through late in the year. Poimiroo offers several recommendations, including Highway 120 and Yosemite National Park, Highway 108 and Ebbetts Pass, Highway 4 and the area above Murphys, Highway 88 and the Hope Valley and Highway 395 and the eastern Sierra. John also suggests watching the tree canopy in your own city as well as local vineyards (don’t overlook gourmet dining and wine-tasting options in your travels).
A highlight of the website is a projection of current and future fall colors, mapped, zeroing in on the most timely places to visit — useful for planning your future fall road trips. Your travels in the Sierra foothills and above will also take you into areas of recent and more historic wildfires; add a second website, caltopo.com, for mapped locations of current and recent forest fires in California for an even more intriguing exploratory visit.
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Poimiroo said, “You have roughly a two-week window from when color begins to show to its peak, with colors based primarily on their elevation and the climate, eastern Sierra versus the western Sierra. Use the California Fall Colors site and its magnifying glass to find location destinations, or search the site by time of year for reports from that same time period, a year ago.”
Poimiroo’s favorites include Yosemite Valley, from mid-October to early November where aspens, black leaf oaks, dogwoods, cottonwoods and poison oak offer hues of yellow, orange and scarlet. He also notes Highway 120 leading out of Yosemite back to Stockton includes a lovely lodge, Evergreen Lodge, near Hetch Hetchy Reservoir with tent cabins for overnights.
Another of his favorites include the Sonora Pass area up Highway 108, above Pinecrest Lake (with Dodge Ridge Resort offering lift-served mountain biking until snow flies). On 108, the highway passes through the Donnell Fire area of 2018, which burned both sides of the highway, leaving only the sign of the historic Dardanelle Resort, and, using the fall color site, locate areas where aspen, poison oak and other high mountain trees and shrubs are painting the valley sides with yellow, fuchsia and red colors.
Highway 108, until snow closes the pass, also offers an incredibly scenic route over to Highway 395, then down the eastern Sierra to several of our favorites, like June Lakes and Mammoth Lakes, where fall colors can be spectacular from early-October to late-October. The town of Mammoth Lakes is one of our favorites, just 4.5 hours from Stockton, with a number of accommodations and fine eating establishments wrapped around the foot of lofty Mammoth Mountain Ski Area.
He also recommends Highway 4 above Murphys, from late October to early November. We both suggest a stop at Ironstone Vineyards, just above Murphys, where Japanese Maple and other trees provide noteworthy fall color. The winery grounds contain 100 acres devoted to vineyards, and 14 acres maintained as gorgeous gardens. Flowers, including 500,000 daffodil bulbs, bloom from February through the late fall, and in late October, we found the trees surrounding the winery’s small lake awash in fall colors.
Make a special stop at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, where changing colors of dogwoods and poison oak, mixed into the redwood bark hues of the huge sequoias make for a special time of the year.
Poimiroo adds that “color change descends on Highway 4 below Ebbetts Pass about 500-1000 feet in elevation per week. Cold, clear, sunny days and dropping temperatures are the primary drivers of fall color change”.
We both encourage, that on your tours up either Highway 108 or Highway 4, make a stop in Columbia, and Columbia State Historic park, to see both colors and the historic old mining town preserved much as it looked in the 1860s. A similar recommendation, tour through the gold rush town of Sutter Creek, a lovely historic destination where cottonwoods set the slopes off with a beautiful yellow and orange glow.
Highway 88 is another special place, with the changing colors of Kirkwood Resort’s Kirkwood Meadows and the Hope River Valley (just over the pass), and its lovely Wilder Resort (formerly Sorenson’s). Wilder Resort offers delicious food and classic mountain cabins for overnights (you will want to return in winter for snowshoeing or cross-country skiing). Pick any of the Sierra highway routes, but do watch for snow possibilities as we get deeper into fall.
Don’t overlook your own cities such as Lodi, Stockton, Manteca, Tracy, Modesto and Sacramento, where a variety of street trees can provide some of the most spectacular color change in the state.
For more insight; California Fall Color, californiafallcolor.com; for forest fire history and locations, Caltopo.com.
Contact Tim, tviall@msn.com; happy fall travels in California.
This article originally appeared on The Record: Fall foliage in California: Where to see fall colors in Valley, Sierra
