"October is like payday with the afternoon off. It is the late afternoon of the year, sunny and warm still, but dramatically sculptured with the season's swelling shadows. The roots of trees and persistent herbs alike are full and stocked with sun-made carbohydrate provisions for the distant spring. In field and prairie seeds are abundant, making life as easy as it ever gets for the grass-gleaning sparrows and the thistle-feasting goldfinches. Likewise, the seed-fed mammals-mice, chipmunks, voles-are at their fattest and most abundant, their legions offering a similar ease and sufficiency to the young owls, red-tailed hawks and foxes honing their hunting skills in preparation for the cold test of winter. The elk in the mountain meadow, the pronghorn in the sagebrush steppe, the whitetail deer at the orchard edge are sleek, strong, fat and full from the summer's plenty and give themselves to the needs of procreation. Bugling, snorting, clashing, courting, their ancient rituals of contest and mating are the heraldic culmination of the year's generative surge.
October is also The Color. Decreasing daylength and the need to avoid winter's cold desiccation prompts many broad-leaved plants to withdraw support from their leafy factories, slowly wall them off and let them go. But in their going, as the green chlorophyll fades, they flash the most extraordinary chromatic excesses of the plant world. Crimson dogwoods, orange sassafras, red maples, yellow birches, purple sweetgums, golden beeches, bronze oaks-nowhere in the world is this display so fine and monumental as it is in the remnants of the eastern hardwood forest of the U.S. Creeping down from the heights of the White and Green Mountains of New England like a glowing tide it flows through the valleys of the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, and as it follows the ridgelines of the Appalachians it sets alight the forests all the way to Georgia.
Though it is at its grandest in the northeastern woods, the color illuminates and graces October in every region. There is the crimson flame of the vine-maple against the deep green of Cascade conifers, Whole mountainsides in Colorado's San Juan's are awash in the clear, tremulous yellows of the quaking aspen. There is the brilliant gold of the black oak against the blue-gray walls of Yosemite's granite and the yellow-orange shimmer of the cottonwood against the red Navaho sandstone of Utah's canyonlands.
Winter's night may be certain and close, but on a clear October day, harvest-fed and color-full, it feels like payday and life is good."
Copyright Steve Manning
Photo by Michele Ross /Utah Aspens taken on Sept 24th 2025
on the Markagunt Plateau
Photo by Michele Ross /Utah Aspens taken on Sept 24th 2025
on the Markagunt Plateau
