We don’t forecast fall color here. Island scrub and grassland. No deciduous canopy. Our model reads latitude and elevation and will happily produce a date for anywhere; publishing one here would be a category error rather than an uncertain forecast, so we don’t.
The place
Five islands an hour off the coast of Ventura, California, that feel like they belong to another continent. Over 2,000 plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth, including the island fox, which is the size of a house cat and afraid of nothing. No cars, no shops, no cell service. Just wind and wildflowers and water so blue it looks fake in photographs.
Established 1980. About 263,000/year visitors.
If you can only come on certain days
Set the days you can be here. Everything under them answers for those days, not for peak.
Thursday 5 November to Friday 6 November
You’ll find it peak color.
That's the day our forecast puts peak color here.
- What turns
- Fremont cottonwood, white alder, willow, California black oak, bigleaf maple
- Entrance
- No entrance fee
What turns, and when
- Fremont cottonwood27%
- white alder18%
- willow18%
- California black oak17%
- bigleaf maple9%
- blue oak8%
Also named across California, outside what the canopy read measures here: Quaking Aspen.
Eastern Sierra aspens turn brilliant gold against granite walls, black oaks in Yosemite Valley go bronze and russet, and cottonwoods line the desert creeks in pale yellow.
Across California as a whole: Late September to mid-October in the Sierra, late October to mid-November in Yosemite Valley.
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. Out here we score it against NASA's satellite record of when the canopy shuts down, read inside each unit’s own boundary: two dates in three land within 12 days of it. How this map is made