About this map

What this is

Every other fall foliage map is a picture of the country colored by latitude. It says the north turns first and the south turns last, which you knew. This one is built from the trees. It knows what species stands in every county and in every national park and forest, how high those trees grow, what this September’s weather is doing to them, and what cameras and people on the ground saw this week. Then it names the place. Not “western Montana” but Flathead National Forest, with its own date and its own week.

You can scrub it to any day of the year and watch the color move. You can type a ZIP and a weekend and get the parks and forests within reach, ranked by how close they’ll be to peak when you arrive. You can open a live forest camera before you drive. And it’s free, with no account, from a public lands newsroom that has spent a decade filming these places in the fall.

What it does that nothing else does

• It forecasts parks and forests as placesEvery national park in the lower 48 with fall canopy, 43 of them, and 123 national forests, among 1,663 destinations in all, wildernesses, recreation areas, refuges and monuments with them, each with its own peak date and its own four-day window, from Acadia to Zion. No other map dates a national forest. They date the county it happens to sit in.
• It knows what’s growing3,104 counties and every forecast place are read from LANDFIRE, the federal 30-meter map of what vegetation grows on every acre of the country. So the forecast knows a stand is quaking aspen at 9,000 feet and not red oak in a valley, and it paints color only where deciduous trees actually stand. Desert parks with a cottonwood creek get a forecast for the creek. Parks with no fall canopy get an honest sentence instead of an invented date.
• Two trees, two peaksIn the northern Rockies the cottonwood and aspen turn, and then two weeks later the western larch does. A map with one date per place is wrong for half the trip. Where a second species turns a week or more after the first, this map prints both.
• It knows how high the trees areColor climbs down a mountain at a measured rate, about a day for every hundred meters of elevation, and twice that for aspen. Every forecast place carries its own elevation from USGS terrain data, sampled inside the park and along the river roads people actually drive, not the summit and not the county average.
• It responds to this yearEvery day through the season it reads September’s temperature against the thirty-year normal and nudges the dates by a rate we measured ourselves over hundreds of camera-years. A hot September pushes peak later. Every other map is the same picture in a hot year and a cold one.
• It listens to the ground, carefully40 live forest cameras that photograph the same trees every day, state foresters’ weekly reports, the USA National Phenology Network’s observers, and geotagged photographs from iNaturalist read for color by machine and checked by eye. A report moves a date only when it should. We measured that letting every report in makes the forecast worse, so each one passes a gate first.
• It runs all yearThe same model predicts when a county greens up in spring, reaches full canopy, peaks, and goes dormant. Scrub the calendar to April and watch the green come north. Bookmark it now: in spring it will follow the green-up for you, and it will forecast the blooms.

Our own decade in the field

Here’s the layer no one else can get. More Than Just Parks has been filming America’s public lands in the fall for more than a decade, and every frame carries a date and a location. Our library holds more than 107,000 frames. Over six thousand of them are geotagged autumn frames from the West alone, across more than 700 trip-days from the Flathead to the Colorado Plateau.

We read those frames the way a forester reads a stand. A frame from the Flathead Valley on 2 October 2018 becomes two readings, not one, because the cottonwood along the river was at 80 percent color and the larch above it hadn’t started, and those are two different trees on two different clocks. Every reading enters the forecast the same way a state forester’s report does, as evidence against the model rather than a number typed over it.

That archive is how we caught the model everyone else ships. A forecast built from latitude and elevation alone runs about ten days early across the northern Rockies and nearly three weeks early on the Colorado Plateau, and there are almost no research cameras out West to tell you so. Our frames told us so. The species layer that fixed it agrees with the old model to half a day on the Front Range and sits three weeks later in southern Utah, which is what our footage from Fishlake in October 2020 shows. The film on this page’s front door is that flight.

How it works, in plain words

Start with what grows there. For every county and every forecast place, read the species mix off the federal vegetation map. Add how high the trees stand. Fit the day each species turns against a decade of forest cameras and dated photographs, including ours. That gives every place a peak date for a normal year.

Then make it this year. Read the September temperature against normal and shift the dates. Read every report from a camera, a forester, an observer, a photograph, or our own crew, and let the ones that pass the gate pull the date toward what the ground says. Print a four-day window around the result, name the place, and show a live camera when there’s one nearby.

Then check ourselves. Every forecast is scored against long-running forest cameras that never saw it, and the whole scorecard is published on the methodology page, region by region, including where we’re weakest. Most maps never tell you. We’d rather you plan the drive knowing.

Who makes it

More Than Just Parks was founded by Jim and Will Pattiz, the Pattiz Brothers, filmmakers who have spent their adult lives documenting and defending America’s public lands. What began as documentary films seen by tens of millions of people has grown into an independent newsroom and a set of public lands tools.

We exist to protect America’s public lands, the forests and deserts, canyons and coastlines that belong to every American in common. Our work runs on three tracks. Investigative journalism on the threats to public lands and the people responsible, public lands tools like this one, and documentary film.

The reporting is funded entirely by readers. We take no money from the industries we cover. Land managers and Capitol Hill staff read us alongside more than 27,000 subscribers to our free daily briefing.

Why it’s free

Public lands belong to everyone, so a tool that helps you see them at their best should be free to everyone. This map will always be free to use, with no account required. If it helps you, the best way to support it is to read and share our journalism, sign up for the briefing, and tell a friend planning a trip.

How to reach us

Questions, corrections, a place that looks wrong, or a press inquiry: email ask@morethanjustparks.com. We read everything and we fix what we get wrong.