The Leaf Roads

People have been driving the leaf roads since before the parkways were finished, pulling over at the same overlooks their parents pulled over at, eating at the same places at the bottom of the same hills, and the ritual has not required updating. What the color does to a mountain range is a thing the photographs have never quite managed, which is why the same people make the same drives year after year and why this issue exists: not to announce a discovery but to hand over the arrangements that the regulars have already worked out, the right weeks, the right roads, the right direction to run them.

The drives in these pages go up the ridgelines and down the river gorges, through the plateau towns and along the lake shores, from the southern Appalachians through the upper Midwest and into the hardwood country of New England, and the timing is everything. Peak color is not a weekend but a window of ten days to two weeks, moving south and downhill as October runs out, and the difference between the correct week and the adjacent one is the difference between the thing itself and its afterthought. The shoulder weeks on either side have their own argument, fewer cars on the pullouts and lower rates at the inns, and several of the regulars will tell you they prefer it that way.

Everything in this issue assumes a car and two or more nights, since the leaf roads do not reward a day trip and the places worth stopping have always been worth sleeping in. Come in October, or come in late September if the elevation is high enough to justify it. Book the inns far earlier than feels reasonable. Leave the route loose enough that a good afternoon can hold you longer than planned, because the correct arrival at any overlook is the one where you are in no particular hurry to leave it.