N 36°20’21.02″ W 80°27’23.86″ Google Earth location
The location plotted is pretty precise for exactly this vantage, but the timing – ah, that’s up to you! The autumn colors weren’t quite at peak, which is a damn hard thing to schedule when you live two hours away from the location, but I got close enough this day back in 2005 – November 6th, to be precise. I’m posting this early to remind those that need it to make their plans, though I may already be a little late for some – this map will help a bit, but be aware, there are regional variations. Being alongside water sources or major highways seems to cause trees to turn a little earlier, and different sides of mountains often vary. I admit that I have yet to snag a really nice, wide-angle scenic shot at peak colors, but also that I haven’t planned specifically for this anyway. My own area (which is not what is shown here) has too few varieties of deciduous trees, far too interspersed with ugly longneedle pines, but ‘peak’ color is wildly misleading anyway – most trees turn on their on schedule and don’t try to coordinate with each other.
Anyway, this is Pilot Mountain in North Carolina, a curious tall knob sprouting from a landscape of minor hills and visible for kilometers, but this view was obtained from the offramp of Rt 52 Northbound – the Southbound ramp doesn’t even let you see the mountain at all, I believe. You can, of course, get to the mountain itself quite easily and even walk around the base of the knob, but the view is better obtained from a short distance off, thus my plot.
The appeal of fall color images is manifest, at least because we know we like bright colors, and I waited some time to let the passing clouds get past enough to mostly frame the peak in blue here. But I’ve long maintained that another reason fall color images work is that depth becomes far more apparent, the varied colors differentiating different layers of hills and trees, as well as clarifying how much smaller the individual trees start to seem with the distance, plainly visible here – had all the trees been roughly the same color, you’d have a hard time knowing where the foreground trees stopped and the mountain slopes began. At least until we develop true 3-dimensional images…
So, make your plans if you need to, and you know how to get here if this is your chosen subject.