Peak color, most of the stand9 NovAim for 8 to 11 Nov
In the park today, Sep 25Still green
white oak and black oak
shagbark hickory and sugar maple, peak Nov 2
Peak color should arrive around 2 Nov for the shagbark hickory and sugar maple, and around 11 Nov for the white oak and black oak.
Roadsides and wetland edges turn first, and the woods behind them run a few days later.
No new reports from the ground here this week.
Still greenStartingNearly peakPeakPast peakNo fall canopy we forecastInside the line, each band of elevation is painted on its own date.
Around Hot Springs National Park Nearly all of the park is in Garland County, which is still green today.By elevation The park runs from about 558 to 1,125 feet. It turns together: there isn’t enough relief here for the color to come down in stages.
1,000–1,250 ftStill greenpeak Nov 816%
750–1,000 ftStill greenpeak Nov 940%
500–750 ftStill greenpeak Nov 944%
SepOctNov
Height off 3DEP inside the park’s own boundary; each band carries the date our model gives that elevation, corrections and all. The percentage is how much of the park stands in it.
That’s 6 days later than our model alone would say. This September has been running warm, which shifts peak color.
The place
Hot Springs is the weird one. Protected in 1832, forty years before Yellowstone, it spent a century as a government-run spa town before anyone thought to call it a national park in 1921. Forty-seven thermal springs still pump out 700,000 gallons of 143-degree water every day, most of it piped into bathhouses along a single downtown street in Arkansas.
Established 1921. About 2.5 million/year visitors.
Set the days you can be here. Everything under them answers for those days, not for peak.
Sunday 8 November to Monday 9 November
You’ll find it peak color.
That's the day our forecast puts peak color here.
1,000–1,250 ftPeak colorpeak Nov 8
750–1,000 ftPeak colorpeak Nov 9
500–750 ftPeak colorpeak Nov 9
Where to drive
Pig Trail Scenic Byway (Route 23), about 90 miles · Talimena National Scenic Byway, about 91 miles · Route 7 Scenic Byway, about 92 miles
What turns
white oak, black oak, shagbark hickory, sugar maple
Entrance
No entrance fee
What turns, and when
white oak44%
black oak29%
shagbark hickory14%
sugar maple14%
Also named across Arkansas, outside what the canopy read measures here: Red Maple, Sweetgum, Blackgum.
The Ozark Mountains produce a warm-toned fall of gold oaks, bronze hickories, crimson blackgums, and the occasional sweetgum burning purple and red along the creek bottoms.
This forecast is built from the species that stand here, their elevation and this September’s weather, and corrected in season by cameras, foresters and our own crew. We score it here against 7 long-running forest cameras: two dates in three land within 13 days of the camera’s own peak. How this map is made
