Camp where the color is turning.

Every line on this page is an observation, not a forecast. A named source published a dated statement about an area, a county or a forestry zone or the ground in front of one fixed camera, and the tracker recorded it with the URL it came from. It says what somebody saw. It doesn’t say what the ridge above your campsite will look like on Saturday, and this page will never pretend otherwise. Color also moves downhill: two campgrounds in the same county, 2,000 feet apart, are often a week apart, which is why the elevation is on every row.

It changes daily. The agency reports underneath are weekly and the join is recomputed every morning through September, October and November. Peak lasts days, not weeks: a state at the top of this list on Tuesday can be past it by the weekend. A report is published here for 14 days and no longer, and this collection is cut tighter still, to reports filed in the last 7 days.

Distance means different things on different rows. A county or forestry-zone report covers an area, and the distance shown is to the representative point that report publishes for it, not to a particular stand of trees. A PhenoCam row is one camera on one patch of forest, and the distance is to that camera. Each row says which it is.

Those six words are the tracker’s own vocabulary, kept exactly as it records them. Nothing here is rounded up: a campground is listed under “peak” because a source used that word about the area it stands in, not because a model thought it was close.