Enjoy The Last Of Vermont Fall Foliage; Wind To Remove Much Of Late Season Color This Week

Trees in my St. Albans, Vermont yard were practically glow
in the dark late Monday afternoon as autumn foliage 
peaked. With gusty winds expected later this week,
a lot of those leaves will be on the ground by Friday.

 It's been a long, gorgeous and later than usual fall foliage season in Vermont.

We've gone into the third week of October and foliage is still at peak in and near the Champlain Valley,. and in the warmer valleys of southern Vermont. 

That's quite a bit later in the month than in most years, but then again, foliage seasons have been coming later as climate change takes hold.

Elsewhere in Vermont the color is past peak, but there's still pockets of bright autumn glory to be found.

Sunshine, light winds, and, on Monday, record high or near record high temperatures helped keep the foliage on the trees

Enjoy it for the next couple of days. We'll soon take a big but admittedly incomplete leap into stick season. 

Winds have already picked up from the nearly dead calm we saw Thursday through Saturday.  It's merely just kind of breezy, but each gust yields a blizzard of leaves from many trees.

Warm breezes will increase Wednesday ahead of a sharp cold front due Wednesday night or very early Thursday. In the Champlain Valley, we could easily see winds gusting to at least 30 mph. 

Then, when that cold front comes through Wednesday night, we won't see much rain, but some gusts could reach 40 mph just after the front blows through.  We'll be waking up to a different landscape Thursday morning compared to the beautiful one we're seeing today.

All is not lost, however. We will have fewer leaves on the trees, but we'll still have some remarkably late season color left in the banana belt sections of Vermont. This beginning to remind me of some recent year, like 2021, when unusually warm autumns allowed some nice spots of fall foliage to linger into November.