Fall Leaf Update for October 11th 2011

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Posted by: Mike Doble

I woke up in the middle of the night to a few scattered raindrops falling against my bedroom window. There was also a little breeze blowing and my thoughts immediately went to one of my favorite scenes this time of year. To me NOTHING portrays Autumn better than seeing leaves covering a wet roadway. As I left out this morning Ironwood Drive was indeed covered with a nice blanket of new fallen fall splendor! That inspired me to snap a couple of photos with my smartphone.

<Photo by Julie Tines from Blowing Rock taken this morning off the Blue Ridge Parkway.

After I got settled in at my desk I checked my emails and evidently one of our readers from yesterday was equally as inspired as Julie Tines from Blowing Rock snapped and had already emailed me this nice photo from just off of Church Road over on the Parkway this morning. Thanks TONS Julie!

Another of our readers emailed me on Monday in response to my comments about seeing all of the people snapping photos while driving this past weekend. (Sorry I don’t have a name, but they wrote), "…(I) did see a guy on a scooter cruising. Is that possible on a scooter? (HE was) on the Blue Ridge Parkway with a guitar case on back & camera in hand-luckily didn’t crash into us!"

John Hoffman of Fred’s General Mercantile was on the radio again this morning warning people about the slick roads…from the thin layer of wet leaves. So NOW we have to be careful of slick, wet, leaf-covered roads, being driven on by cruising scooter riders driving one-handed while shooting photos! Such is life here in the mountains 😉

Funny stuff…

FALL LEAF UPDATE:

<Click to ENLARGE to see this nice photo of Sugar Mountain on Saturday!

I don’t know if I’ve just been unusually preoccupied lately but the fall colors seemingly just popped out of nowhere this season. It was as if everything was green and then suddenly changed in a couple of days to yellow to all of the colors in the rainbow. Admittedly I haven’t seen any BLUE leaves but there are some out there nearly purple!

I’d say that most of the resort areas with elevations above 4000′ are AT PEAK RIGHT NOW and perhaps a little past it. Elevations below 4000′ are looking quite beautiful and it appears that once the sun pops back out we should see some awesome color bursting from every hillside.

The forecast for today and Wednesday is for a little more rain here in the North Carolina mountains and then SUNSHINE from Thursday through the weekend. It appears that showers will still be in the areas further north into West Virginia through Friday – but the weekend looks gorgeous up there as well!

This weekend’s Woolly Worm Festival should be a record breaker if this past weekend’s Oktoberfest at Sugar crowd was any indication. Kim Jochl of Sugar sent out a blanket "thank you" to all of the members of the Banner Elk Chamber (of which I am a member) and she confirmed my estimate of Monday that the crowds this past weekend were larger than I’ve ever seen at previous Oktoberfest weekends.

We’re only SIX DAYS AWAY from going into "FULL SKI MODE" around here at SkiSoutheast.com land! We’ve been making lots of tweaks to the websites and we’re excited about how things are coming together. We’ll share those things with you guys in the next week or two.

Be sure to check out each of the ski area pages on our site and a couple of things that you’ll probably notice is that we’ve added helpful links to lodging, dining, etc for each resort community. We’ve also done away with the Weather.com magnets and replaced them with station information coming FROM the resort community and linked to dedicated weather websites for the region covered. More about that later!

Also you’ll want to check out www.HighCountryWebCams.com and click on the new Massanutten camera. That bad boy is LIVE STREAMING and HD size and quality. We can’t wait to see some snow on that trail! Right now you can see that the fall color season has yet to hit up there. The cams at Wisp Resort (especially the one from the top of Squirrel Cage) are showing some nice color around Deep Creek Lake. We’re also excited to share that we have three additional resorts that are installing LIVE STREAMING cameras with us. We’ll let that cat the rest of the way out of the bag in the next few days.

In the meantime…if you guys snap any great photos or videos, send them to me at [email protected] and I’ll make you famous…or at least regionally famous in a we-can-get-your-name-in-front-of-17,781-people-that-visited-us-YESTERDAY kind of way!

Until Next Time…

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Fall Leaf Update for October 11th 2011: This photo provided by Julie Tines of Blowing Rock shows PEAK COLOR!
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