ASHEVILLE – Get the selfie sticks ready and give the OK to out-of-town guests.

This could be the year when the Western North Carolina mountains get their “traditional” fabulous fall foliage, according to local leaf color prognosticators, although Hurricane Dorian and future tropical storms are the looming X factor.

“My best prediction based on the summer we’ve had and the long range forecast for a little warmer than normal September and October, but back to normal rainfall patterns, barring unpredictable things like storms, I think we might have a more traditional fall, with brighter colors,” said Beverly Collins, professor of biology at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.

Each year in late August, Collins pulls out her weather data, digs into her font of ecological knowledge and looks at the hillsides around the Jackson County campus to give her educated guess on what the millions of visitors can expect late September through early November.

This is when they crowd towns from Black Mountain to Burnsville to Bryson City, and outdoor wonderlands from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Bent Creek to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Last year October was the busiest month on the 469-mile scenic parkway, which hugs some of the highest peaks in the Southern Appalachians, with 1.9 million visitors, compared with 1.7 million visitors in July 2018.

So, while those in the tourism industry always keep fingers crossed for a good fall forecast, it looks like this year will be good for filling beds and roads.

“The last couple of years the colors have been kind of muted. It’s been warmer and wetter, or very dry going back to 2016, and we’ve gotten some windstorms. Between leaves getting knocked off from storms, and being warmer and wetter, those aren’t conditions that give us great color,” Collins said.

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“I’m thinking this year we’ll be back to more typical colors, more variety and brighter than we’ve had in recent years.”

Collins said sumac is already just slightly starting to turn red along the streams and roadsides at the 2,400-feet elevation of the campus. Asheville sits at 2,200 feet elevation.

According to the National Weather Service, while July hit record-high temperatures around the country, including in Alaska, Asheville’s summer has only been slightly above normal, and just about average rainfall.

The average high temperature for July was 85.8 degrees, said Doug Outlaw, NWS meteorologist in Greenville, South Carolina. The normal Asheville July average high is 84 degrees. The average low was 65.7, 1.7 degrees warmer than the normal average low of 64.

Rainfall in July for Asheville was 0.62 inches below normal at 3.69 inches of rain.

So far in August the average high temperature has been 84 degrees, a bit above the average of 82, Outlaw said. So far this month for Asheville, the rainfall is very close to normal at 3.98 inches. The norm for August is 4.4 inches.

What makes for a ‘good’ fall season?

Collins said the biggest factor in bringing out the best in fall color is when the days get shorter, and leaves don’t have as much time to photosynthesize – or make the green pigment in leaves known as chlorophyll – so the yellows and oranges start to show through.

“The immediate factor that causes chlorophyll to slow is if we get a cold snap. Once temperatures at night start going down into the 50s and 40s, typically around mid-October, then we often get that cold snap that triggers the plants to slow chlorophyll production,” she said.

“It’s the combination of the day length and the weather. Sunny and bright in the daytime and crisp and cool at night, that’s weather for leaf change.”

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Trees change color earlier at the typically cooler higher elevations and later at the warmer lower elevations, and the various species found at WNC’s wide-ranging elevations (2,000 feet to more than 6,000 feet) operate on different schedules, she said.

“In looking at the typical Southern Appalachian vista, the highest elevations that have fir and spruce trees stay dark green all year. Moving down in elevation, maple, cherry and birch trees of the northern hardwood forests often turn early, with predominately reds and yellows,” Collins said.

“The mixed oak-hardwood forests often turn over a more prolonged time, with the reds, oranges and yellows of maples, birches and tulip poplar appearing earlier, and the more muted yellows and reds of oaks appearing later. Sycamores, maples, walnut and birches along streams tend to turn yellow, then brown, and the leaves fall early.”

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Dr. Howard Neufeld, professor of plant eco-physiology at Appalachian State University in Boone, who also manages the “Fall Color Guy” Facebook page, said many people rate a “good” fall season based on the vibrancy of the reds – the black gums, red oaks, sourwoods, red maples.

“The oranges and yellows are pretty constant year to year because those pigments are already in leaves, but are covered in chlorophyll. When the chlorophyll goes away, that’s when pigments come out,” Neufeld said.

But the red pigment is not there. The trees make it in the fall. They need sunny days to perform photosynthesis to make sugars that make those red compounds, Neufeld said, which is why a cloudy fall leads to dull colors.

“If we don’t have any extreme weather, we should have a decent season. We should get colors concentrated in a seven-10 day period, instead of some early and some late,” he said.

When will fall color peak in the mountains?

The million-dollar question is of course the one that can’t be answered without a magic 8-ball.

Neufeld said he agrees this will be a more vibrant fall color year, and expects peak to be “right on time.”

Where he lives in Watauga County at 3,300 feet elevation, the black gums, sourwoods and dogwoods are already starting to get a blush of red. The higher elevations where there are still a predominance of hardwood trees, such as Graveyard Fields on the parkway, at over 5,000 feet in altitude, should start to show peak color at the beginning of October.

The Boone and High Country area will peak Oct. 12-20, Neufeld predicted. For Asheville, he says peak should be Oct. 21 to the end of October.

“The fact that we haven’t had unusually extreme temperatures this summer makes me think September won’t be that unusual either, and we won’t have that crazy delay in color we had last year,” he said.

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The wild card, of course is peak leaf season also coincides with peak hurricane season in the Carolinas. Hurricane Dorian could be moving into the mountains or the coast early next week, but that should not have any bearing on leaf colors, since they have not started to turn color yet and are still firmly attached to trees.

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But it’s the next round of storms that could play a part, said Corey Davis, applied climatologist with the State Climate Office in Raleigh.

So far this year, Asheville has had 41.71 inches of rain, the seventh wettest year on record dating to 1946, Davis said. The average annual rainfall is 45.57 inches per year.

But it was nothing compared to last year, the wettest year in Asheville history, with 79.48 inches of rain.

“As we get into the fall, we look at the el Niño when the jet stream tends to be stronger and we tend to get wetter weather, coming up from the Gulf of Mexico,” Davis said.

“The La Niña pattern is when the jet stream tends to be weaker and drier. Right now we’re not in either pattern. We’re in a neutral pattern and when that happens, our weather tends to be more variable. That’s what we’re expecting into the fall and maybe into the winter.”

The good news is that North Carolina is not in drought and there is no concern about drought developing, he said.

Luckily, for WNC, which has such high biodiversity and range of elevations, there will surely be worthy fall color somewhere within an hour or two drive of Asheville this fall, Collins said.

Some resources for following the fall leaves