Fall Colors

Color in the High Country - Colorado

We have lived in several places but have spent most of our lives in Michigan, Colorado and North Carolina.

We haven't seen much color fall color since we left Aspen in 1988. Around New Bern there is mostly pines so not too much color. There is the occasional ginkgo tree here that is a beautiful yellow, but there aren't that many of them so the color is mostly green.

In Colorado we lived at a very high elevation, about 9000 feet. In September we would start seeing fall on the horizon.

Fall didn't last too long! One morning you'd wake up and see a small stripe of yellow which was at about 12000 feet. The trees were all aspens so they turned a bright yellow in the fall. Right behind the stripe of yellow would be white. So each morning we'd look up and see the white getting wider and the yellow stripe coming down the mountain towards us.

Michigan Color

 We would start getting depressed because we'd see winter getting closer every day. The winters are beautiful in the mountains of Colorado the sun shines all the time, but it's still winter 8 months out of the year which is why we moved to North Carolina!

Here in North Carolina we look forward to September when it cools off.

In Michigan the trees in the fall are beautiful, bright reds, yellows, and oranges. It is stunning! But again we knew winter was right behind. We didn't get so much snow in Michigan (annually 35 inches in Michigan where we lived and 300 in Aspen) but the bad part of a Michigan winter is that you don't see the sun from the first of November until the end of March. When we were growing up it would occasionally drop to 20 below. I don't think it does that so much any more.

We just got back from picking up pottery from Jim and Shirl Parmentier in western North Carolina so got a dose of fall color. We did talk to a lady in Bakersville who moved there from Maine. She said it just wasn't the same as Maine. "Not enough red - people need to plant some Maple trees around here!"

We saw some beautiful trees on our trip!  Reminded us of Michigan.