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If fall is your favorite season and aspens are your favorite tree, you have only a limited amount of time and places available to see these quaking fall colors at their peak.
One of the best places to see the yellows, oranges and reds of aspens is along the Deschutes River just southwest of Bend. The best colors are just upriver of Dillon Falls where most of the aspens are located on the east side of the river in front of the lava flow. When I was there last week the colors were not quite at their peak so there's still a few weeks left for leaf peeping.
I started out at the Dillon Falls trailhead and hiked a short distance down to the falls. Besides aspens there were willows, alders and other riparian vegetation showing their autumn colors. Columns of sunlight streaked down through the rising mist of the falls.
Standing at the brink of the falls, I wondered why anyone would attempt it in a kayak. Some have made
Next I walked upriver and became mesmerized at the brilliant aspens reflecting in the still river - golden globes of leaves supported by white trunks. A little farther upriver, another clone of aspens had a more reddish hue.
There are several access points along the 8.5-mile Deschutes River Trail so if there are hikers in your group, it's possible to drop them off at one site and pick them up at the next site. For example, it's only about a mile and a half from Dillon Falls to the next downriver access called Aspen, another great spot to see fall colors.
I drove to the Aspen trailhead and walked downriver through stands of aspens and alders. The morning's dew left droplets of water on freshly fallen leaves. Recent beaver activity could be seen along the trail.
To reach the Deschutes River Trail, travel six miles out of Bend on the Cascades Lakes Highway. The lower trailhead (Meadow Picnic Area) is located just before the Widgi Creek Resort on FS Road 100. To reach the upper trailheads, continue on the highway about a mile and take a left on Route 41. A sign indicates the Deschutes River Recreation Sites. Look for signs along this road to Dillon Falls and Aspen. Go to the end of the pavement to reach Benham Falls, the upper end of the trail.
Autumn Colors
There are three factors that influence how leaves change their color: the type of leaf pigments, the length of night and the weather. This time of year, as nights grow longer and cooler, leaves undergo biochemical processes that change their green coloring to the brilliant fall colors that brighten the landscape.
Leaves have three types of pigments. Chlorophyll, which is essential for photosynthesis, gives leaves their green color. Carotenoids provide yellow, orange and brown colors, while anthocyanins produce more red and purple colors. In the fall, chlorophyll production slows and eventually ceases altogether. This is when the carotenoids and anthocyanins show their colors.
Weather can have an affect on autumn color. For example, the best display of colors often follows a series of warm, sunny days and cool nights that don't dip below freezing. Other factors such as summer drought can delay the turning of the leaves by a few weeks, which is what appears to have happened this year.
Aspens (Populus tremuloides)
Nothing says fall like a stand of aspen trees. Golden aspens flutter in the autumn breeze, often making for a brilliant contrast against a background of conifer trees.
From the eastern U.S. and Canada to the arid West, aspen is the most widely distributed tree on the continent. Besides their aesthetic beauty, aspen stands provide unique ecological and recreational values.
The stems of aspen leaves are flat rather than round, providing flexibly (and quaking) in the wind and allowing the trees to survive strong storms. This also improves the rate of photosynthesis throughout the tree by reducing the exposure of the outer leaves to extreme sunlight by presenting the leaves at an oblique angle to the sun throughout the day, while at the same time allowing more light to pass through to the lower leaves, which are generally in shade. This enables all leaves throughout the tree to photosynthesize more efficiently.
Although countless numbers of seeds are released in the spring, aspens reproduce primarily from suckers sprouting from the stand’s root system, forming clones. All the trees in a clone have identical characteristics and share a root structure. The members of a clone can be distinguished from those of a neighboring clone often by a variety of traits such as leaf shape and size, bark character, branching habit, resistance to disease and air pollution, time of flushing, and autumn leaf color. A clone may turn color earlier or later in the fall or exhibit a different fall color variation than its neighboring aspen clones, thus providing a means to tell them apart.
A mature root system from an aspen stand can produce up to 1 million shoots per acre and individual trees can live to 150 years. Some clones are estimated at 10,000 years old. One colony in Utah, named Pando, is said to be 80,000 years old. The 100-acre colony and its root system are thought to be the heaviest and oldest living organism in the world.
New stems in the colony may appear at up to 30 to 40 yards from the parent tree. Some aspen colonies can spread about three feet per year across the forest floor. The trees are able to survive forest fires since the roots are below the heat of the fire, with new sprouts growing after the fire burns out.
Beavers will go to work on aspens before any other tree. Ruffed grouse and other birds prize the aspen’s buds in winter as a food source. Quaking aspens have a wider range than any other tree of North America.
