A Fall Drive on the North Shore

This summer, as one week wended toward the next with no sign of rain, many of us believed we'd have little fall color. The trees were too stressed we thought. And, when the color seemed to peak around September 15, we thought the summer draught would cause the leaves to fall before we'd had a chance to view them. Well, we were wrong. Totally wrong. This has been the most beautiful North Shore fall I can remember – and it's still in process as some of you have seen from the articles I've posted recently: A photographic walk along the Superior Hiking Trail in late September and  A Hike Along the Gitchi Gami Trail.

The leaves seem to have a laser-like quality to them. Golden aspen leaves tremble among the claret, amber, and tangerine leaves of the maples, the shimmering birch, the darkening spruce. I feel like I did when, as a teenager, I was given glasses to correct my nearsightedness. I could see leaves at a distance. Each leaf. Not a mass of green banked against the blue sky. I feel like this now. As if I'd just been given glasses and I don't know how to explain it. Is it really more beautiful than ever? Or is it my growing sense of beauty's fragility? And to think, I get to drive these routes, a color drive that people drive hundreds of miles to view in the fall. Gratitude doesn't seem enough of a word to express what I feel. Miracle might capture the essence of such experience.

Fall Along Moose Drive in Schroeder

Fall on the 600 Road in Schroeder