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 forecast
Around Indiana Dunes National Park Porter County holds most of the park and is still green today. Lake County, to the southwest, is on the same day.
That’s 3 days later than our model alone would say. This September has been running warm, which shifts peak color.
The place
Fifteen miles of Lake Michigan shoreline less than 50 miles from downtown Chicago, and it took until 2019 for anyone to call it a national park. Indiana Dunes packs over 1,100 flowering plant species into its beaches, bogs, and oak savannas. The biodiversity per acre rivals almost anywhere in the system.
Established 2019. About 2.7 million/year visitors.
Set the days you can be here. Everything under them answers for those days, not for peak.
Saturday 24 October to Sunday 25 October
You’ll find it peak color.
That's the day our forecast puts peak color here.
Where to drive
Illinois River Road (Route 29), about 101 miles
What turns
northern red oak, white oak, red maple, shagbark hickory, silver maple
Entrance
$25
What turns, and when
northern red oak20%
white oak20%
red maple17%
shagbark hickory10%
silver maple9%
sugar maple6%
Also named across Indiana, outside what the canopy read measures here: Tulip Poplar, Sassafras.
Brown County's rolling hills of sugar maples turn vivid orange and scarlet, with sassafras adding electric orange and tulip poplars fading to clear gold in the hollows.
Across Indiana as a whole: Mid-October in the north, late October in Brown County and southern Indiana.
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 13 long-running forest cameras: two dates in three land within 9 days of the camera’s own peak. How this map is made
