We don’t forecast fall color here. Measured turning canopy covers 0.00% of this unit, below the 0.5% we forecast on. 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.
That’s 1 day later than our model alone would say. This September has been running warm, which shifts peak color.
The place
Seventy miles west of Key West, reachable only by boat or seaplane. Fort Jefferson is a massive, unfinished Civil War fortress built from 16 million bricks, the largest masonry structure in the Americas. The snorkeling off the walls is some of the best in the country, and almost nobody knows about it.
Established 1992. About 84,000/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.
Sunday 29 November to Monday 30 November
You’ll find it peak color.
That's the day our forecast puts peak color here.
- What turns
- Sweetgum, Red Maple, Bald Cypress, Hickory, Dogwood
- Entrance
- $15
What turns, and when
Sweetgum, Red Maple, Bald Cypress, Hickory, Dogwood. Bald cypresses turn russet and copper along the rivers, sweetgums provide scattered red and purple, and the maples in the Panhandle produce pockets of real color.
Across Florida as a whole: Late November through December in the Panhandle, spotty elsewhere.
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