Michael Wright: Don’t miss the leaf show

Leaves get taken for granted all summer long.

In the spring, they sprout on barren limbs, a sign of life after a long winter.

For the next several months, they are just kind of there – a mundane backdrop to the excitement of summer.

Fall is their time to shine.

The color show has just begun in the Inland Northwest, with aspens and hawthorns and other deciduous flora starting to brighten the landscape with flashes of orange, red and yellow.

This annual change arrives thanks to the breaking down of chlorophyll. As temperatures drop and days shorten, the chlorophyll that makes leaves green starts to break down. Other colors get a chance to shine through.

That makes for eye candy all over the region, from the trees along the Spokane River downtown to the larches high in the mountains between here and Montana.

It is as good a reason as any to go outside.

It is not yet the peak season here in Spokane, but it is getting close. A live map of fall foliage across the country is available on explorefall.com. This week, the map showed a small area immediately surrounding Spokane as having “high color,” but not yet “peak color.”

That rang true on Thursday as I went looking for fall colors.

In the morning, I found reds, yellows and oranges along the Spokane River in Peaceful Valley, but also plenty of green.

In the afternoon, I headed for Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge. Aspen groves there still looked pretty green, with splashes of yellow and orange. At a few spots, a single orange or yellow tree stood out underneath the towering pines – a fall Easter egg livening things up.

Holly Weiler, the east side trails coordinator for the Washington Trails Association and avid hiker herself, was on the Columbia Plateau State Park Trail this week. She said the hawthorns looked gorgeous, but that the aspens had not really started changing yet.

Weather plays a big role, and the drop in temperatures this week should speed up the transition.

“We just had the first hard frost on Monday, so I’m thinking it should be pretty soon,” Weiler said.

How soon? Maybe days, maybe a week. The only way to know is to go look.

There is no wrong direction to go from Spokane. Turnbull is a short ways from Cheney, and it has a lovely auto tour route and a handful of easy trails.

Among Weiler’s favorite spots to see fall colors is Fishtrap Recreation Area, about 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management property about 30 miles west of Spokane. It is a sea of sagebrush near Fishtrap Lake that is interspersed with aspen groves.

Fishtrap is popular with pheasant hunters, and the season opens this weekend. Wearing orange or other bright colors would be wise.

Turnbull and Fishtrap are managed by the federal government, which is on its third week of a shutdown. The lapse in funding means limited staffing for the BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages Turnbull. If you visit either site, pack out what you pack in, and consider picking up some trash.

Mount Spokane State Park might be the most obvious destination for fall colors, and for good reason. The road into the park is lined with shrubs and aspens that were already changing colors when I stopped there briefly last week.

Weiler said the mountain is one of the best places around to see western larch.

“They’re just everywhere,” she said, adding that they were a bright chartreuse on her last trip there.

Anyone who has driven between Spokane and Missoula on Interstate 90 in the fall knows there is a good larch show to see there. Pulling off the interstate and taking a hike would pay dividends. Stevens Lake is one of the more popular trails up there, but it would be hard to go wrong.

Really anywhere you go to hike or hunt or fish or pick berries probably has some amount of color to see. So just go. Getting outside is the whole point.

That and making sure there are at least a few days a year when leaves are not taken for granted.