EDITOR'S NOTE: News stories often have far more to say than one headline might be able to share. With that in mind, this is another installment of Reporter's Notebook, an occasional series that will offer deeper looks into recent news articles by the LehighValleyNews.com staff.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — The sky was an endless sheet of blue, unobstructed by clouds Monday afternoon at the Bake Oven Knob lookout.
Against the cerulean backdrop, the brilliant golds, oranges and reds of the changing leaves speckled the landscape, broken only by a patchwork of farms and residences.
After a few short minutes — enough time to take in the panoramic views, catching our breath from the half-mile, rocky uphill scramble to the summit — we turned our backs to the vista and started our descent.
“Let’s go,” I said. “On to the next stop.”
Over the past few weeks, Grace Oddo, LehighValleyNews.com’s social media specialist, and I have collected reader suggestions to create a fall foliage tour, focusing on some of the Valley’s best leaf-peeping spots. Peak foliage season here is expected to start Thursday, the fifth of the commonwealth’s six-week season.
We started at about 11 a.m. at Jacobsburg State Park’s Sobers Run Trail Head in the Nazareth area before heading to state game lands, then to the Lehigh Gap Nature Center in Slatington and Bake Oven Knob near Germansville.
After an accidental detour into Berks County, we stopped at the Trexler Nature Preserve in North Whitehall Township and Trexler Memorial Park in Allentown before ending the day with the Lehigh Parkway and, finally, the Saucon Rail Trail in Bethlehem.
Completing the almost 117-mile loop (including the accidental detour into Berks) took about five hours, a little over a quarter tank of gas in my Chevy sedan, and necessitated one restroom and coffee break.
“I didn’t think it would take this long,” Grace said to me about halfway through our tour as we navigated the back roads lined by crispy brown fallen leaves.
“You made the map,” I responded, our laughter slipping out the car’s open windows, past the tree canopy and into the endless sky.
‘A brilliant crescendo’
Last week marked the fourth week of the commonwealth’s leaf-peeping season, with foliage in the state’s most northern counties already starting to fade. Lehigh and Northampton counties, as well as counties south of the Valley, were forecast to be “approaching best color” — the last stage before the peak.
“The pattern of chilly nights has continued, coaxing many forest canopies comprising Penn’s Woods to a brilliant crescendo,” according to a post on the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Facebook page. "Vivid fall color is now widespread throughout the commonwealth.”
Brillant is an understatement — whether on a walking path, in a park or from the top of a lookout on the Appalachian Trail, the Valley’s foliage was radiant. The reds burst under the sunlight, brushing against the yellows and oranges in the breeze, almost like fire.
At each stop, Grace and I considered several different variables, from parking and accessibility to the foliage hue.
At Sobers Run, for example, the parking lot is positioned on a slight incline, while the trail is flat. I swear I could hear my car’s suspension falter as we drove up the steep road to the trailhead that would lead us to Bake Oven Knob. The hike to the lookout was rocky and slippery with leaves, slowing our progress, but the views at the top were spectacular.
We couldn’t help ourselves at one point, throwing on my car’s hazards as we pulled over on Lower Smith Gap Road to get pictures because it was so beautiful.
And while taking a right instead of a left sent us in the wrong direction at one point, the mistake was rewarded with a gorgeous juxtaposition of decay — crunchy leaves, fields of mature corn and row after row of sunflowers past their peak, well past their prime, their heads bowed toward the ground as if to sleep.
The tour took us counter-clockwise around the counties, and almost all of the locations on the nine-stop loop were populated — people hiked, biked, walked and even sat, taking the time to soak up the brilliance of the fall foliage under a perfect sky before the trees go bare and winter moves in.
