The weather seems to have gotten back to “Fall normal” as we move through the month of October in the North Carolina mountains around Asheville. Cool nights are back, as are sunny days. And it looks like the color that we do have will be lovely for Week 4 of our fall season.
Happy New Year! And yippee! Our first snow of the winter season arrived on January 6, 2017, blanketing Pisgah National Forest around Asheville, including our neck of the woods at the Inn on Mill Creek with several inches of beauty. Stillness. Peaceful. Calming. Quiet. A great way to kick off the new year.
Finally(!), oak trees are changing en masse, with bold orange and rust-colored tones dominate the landscape at our elevation of 2,300 feet in the North Carolina mountains. This will be our final fall color report for 2016, and it’s been a beautiful fall season.
While peak color has ended in several areas above 3,500 feet, color remains at elevations below that, including the immediate Asheville area. We still have green leaves on our oak trees, in fact. Fall is going to linger on into November, yay!
Fall color has quickly worked its way down the mountainsides near Asheville, NC, adding some nice hues to the landscape at elevations between 2,000 and 3,000 feet heading into the last part of October. Some oranges and reds are lingering at higher elevations as well, but those areas above 3, 500 feet will be slipping past peak soon.
Oh la la, fall color is making a real splash at elevations above 3,500 feet in the mountains around Asheville, NC, this week, with peak color set to arrive at those elevations over the next few days. Meanwhile, here inside Pisgah National Forest at 2,300 feet, the fall foliage is starting to quickly dominate the landscape in some parts of the forest (as you can see from our cover photo of our labyrinth taken on Oct. 16).
As we enter mid-October, color is slowly but surely progressing at our elevation of 2,300 feet above sea level, inside Pisgah National Forest east of Asheville, NC. Mother Nature is using a mostly-yellow color palette at the moment.
Here we are – the 2016 fall season has arrived to the North Carolina mountains! We’re one week into fall and, somewhat similar to last year, we have actual fall color to report even though it’s very early in the season and still mostly green.
As a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the North Carolina State Park System in 2016, we’ve been featuring one of the four state parks closest to the Inn on Mill Creek each month this summer. We cap off our summer and our highlights of nearby state parks this month with Lake James State Park.
We’ve got a secret hidden gem of a place to share with you: the nature trail at the Old Fort Picnic Area. If you’re reading this, shhh. Don’t tell anyone. Just kidding. But not about the nature trail and the picnic grounds being a gem.
