Chase the Changing Season
Fall colors hit the Colorado high country in September and don’t reach the Florida cypress until the holidays, so a rider who follows them gets about three months of good weekends. / Oct 19, 2026 /
Kick the sidestand down on a gravel pullout below Red Mountain Pass on the last Saturday of September and look up. The entire hillside is gold, and the aspen leaves won’t stay still, even in a light breeze.
A week later the colors will have moved lower and farther south, and by early November it’ll be down in the Ozarks. Anyone willing to follow it can stretch fall out for months.
Yamaha’s first motorcycle ended up with a name tied to autumn, though nobody at the factory planned it that way. The YA-1 went into production in early 1955. It was a 125cc two-stroke single, built by a company that had spent close to seventy years making pianos and organs.
Nearly every motorcycle on Japanese roads back then was black, and the designers wanted theirs to stand out. They painted the frame a reddish chocolate brown, taken from the wrapper of a popular Meiji chocolate, and gave the tank a two-tone cream finish. People saw the slim red bike and started calling it Aka-tombo, the Red Dragonfly.
In Japan the red dragonfly is closely tied to autumn. The species people usually associate by the name spends summer up in the mountains and comes down to the lowland rice fields as the nights get cooler.
Fall colors in North America move in a similar way. It starts at high elevations and far north, then works its way down the mountains and south. Getting from the Colorado high country to the cypress swamps of Florida takes about three months.
That changes how to plan a fall ride. Plenty of riders pick one weekend near home for peak colors, and if a week of wind and rain comes through first, they’ve missed it.
If the season is treated as a line that moves, there are a dozen or more good weekends between mid-September and the holidays. It’s just a matter of knowing where that line is on a given Saturday.
Colorado turns first. The northern ranges around Steamboat Springs and Rocky Mountain National Park usually change in mid-September, and the San Juans in the southwest follow from late September into early October. According to the San Juan National Forest, aspens make up about a fifth of the state’s forest. A whole hillside often turns at once because a single stand is frequently one organism growing from one root system.
Aspen leaves sit on flattened stems, so it takes only a light breeze to set an entire slope shimmering. From a pullout it sounds like rain that never hits the ground.
The San Juan Skyway is the classic ride, a loop of about 230 miles through Durango, Silverton, Ouray and Telluride. The exact mileage depends a little on who’s counting.
It tops out near 11,000 feet on Red Mountain Pass. Between Silverton and Ouray, on the stretch called the Million Dollar Highway, the road clings to canyon walls with long drop-offs and almost no shoulder. Late-September mornings up there often start near freezing, so it’s a road to ride at an easy pace with a warm layer on until the sun gets over the peaks.
Between Ridgway and Telluride, turn the Ténéré 700 off the pavement onto Last Dollar Road, a dirt road that climbs through the aspens. That side trip is the reason to bring this bike.
The 21-inch front wheel and 9.4 inches of ground clearance are what make the dirt road an easy call, and 8.3 inches of fork travel takes the edge off the washboard. The 689cc CP2 twin is counterbalanced and makes smooth, broad power, with two throttle maps to choose from, SPORT and EXPLORER.
The tank holds 4.2 gallons, and there’s fuel in Durango, Silverton, Ouray and Telluride, so range isn’t a worry. The bike weighs 459 pounds wet, and at 34.4 inches the seat is tall, so shorter riders should pick pullouts carefully.
By the first two weeks of October, the color has reached northern New England. The Kancamagus Highway, New Hampshire Route 112, runs 34.5 miles between Lincoln and Conway through the White Mountain National Forest and climbs to 2,855 feet at Kancamagus Pass. There isn’t a gas station or a business anywhere along it.
The Civilian Conservation Corps started connecting the road’s two halves in the 1930s, and the job took about 25 years. The color here comes from maple, beech and birch, which bring the reds the Rockies mostly lack, since aspens turn yellow and gold. The second weekend in October is usually the busiest. For a quieter ride, go early on a weekday, when the Swift River can be heard from the pullouts along the lower part of the road.
Late October is Ozarks season. The Pig Trail Scenic Byway follows Arkansas 23 for about 19 miles through the Boston Mountains and the Ozark National Forest, crossing the Mulberry River along the way.
From mid-October into early November, oak and hickory branches close over the road in reds and golds. Motorcycle magazines have been sending riders there for years, and one run through the switchbacks shows why.
November belongs to the Texas Hill Country, which catches a lot of people off guard. Lost Maples State Natural Area is five miles north of Vanderpool on Ranch Road 187.
It protects a stand of bigtooth maples that got stranded in sheltered limestone canyons when the climate warmed, hundreds of miles south of where the species normally grows. They usually turn red and orange from late October into mid-November. The park can fill up on peak weekends, so it’s smarter to go on a weekday and plan ahead.
Ranch Road 337 runs right through Vanderpool. Together with 335 and 336, it makes up the Twisted Sisters, three ranch roads that riders link into a loop of about 100 miles by most counts, through Leakey and Camp Wood.
Gas stations are few and far between out there. Deer are out at dawn and dusk, so midday is a good time to ride it.
At lunch in Leakey, the people at the next table are usually arguing about which of the Sisters was twistier that morning. They never settle it.
Florida’s fall comes last, and it looks different. The 34th Biketoberfest in the Daytona Beach area runs October 15 through 18, and for most riders there, fall means drier air on the Ormond Beach Scenic Loop, not leaves changing color.
Somebody at a gas pump in Ormond Beach will say it finally feels like fall. They mean the humidity is down.
The color shows up later. In north and central Florida the leaves start changing in November and keep going past the holidays. The bald cypress is one of the few conifers that drops its needles, and it goes from summer green to a rusty bronze that lasts a month or more.
Seventy-one years after the YA-1, the red dragonfly still describes how the season moves pretty well. It shows up in the high country first and drifts down to the lowlands as the nights get cold, and anyone paying attention can follow it most of the way across the country.
That means there’s no single peak weekend, just the next one, a little farther south. By November the Kanc is mostly bare, and Lost Maples is just getting started.
Next year’s plan is easy. Start in the San Juans at the end of September, then head one region south every couple of weekends as the color moves.
In Florida the cypress stay copper until after the holidays.