Today is the Autumnal Equinox, the day when there are exactly equal hours of daylight and darkness. As such it also marks the “official” end of summer and beginning of autumn or fall in the northern hemisphere.
The shortest day of the year falls on December 21, the Winter Solstice, when winter begins “officially.” In both cases the so-called “scare” quotes refer to the fact that perceived autumn and winter begin on different days depending on in what climate zone one resides.
Here in the Rocky Mountains, at 6300 ft. elevation it has felt and looked like autumn since late August. It will feel like winter sometime in November. When we get to California in early October, it will still look and feel like summer and we’ll probably experience a couple of days at or above 90 degrees.
The leaves are turning here now, the shrubby Rocky Mountain maples are various beautiful shades of red and the aspen leaves turn pure pale yellow. In CA near sea level, we won’t get fall color until sometime in November.
The small-for-CA town where we shop and formerly worked is covered in huge, old deciduous trees which drop so many leaves the city funds a leaf abatement program just to stay tidy. For 7-8 months of the year those trees make the older residential streets around the campus into green “tunnels.”
In normal, non-Covid-19 years kids from SoCal come there to university and fall in love with the place, where among other CA oddities the creek through campus runs year round. In SoCal, creeks and rivers never run year round, they only have water for a few days after a winter rain.
