Camp where the color is turning.
Somebody looked at the trees and wrote down what they saw. This page takes those reports — state forestry bureaus, tourism boards, the PhenoCam Network, collected by the More Than Just Parks foliage tracker — and puts them next to the federal campgrounds they cover. Nothing in the record is at peak today. Every row says who reported it, when, and how far away they were standing.
What a report is, and what it is not
read this before the listEvery line on this page is an observation, not a forecast. A named source published a dated statement about an area — a county, 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 does not 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.
Where the color is, by state
The tracker holds no report within reach of a federal campground right now. Reports arrive as the state agencies publish them, which is usually once a week from the middle of September. This page fills as they do.
Nothing is invented in the meantime. A campground page shows a fall-color line only when a real, dated report covers it, and it disappears again once that report is more than 14 days old. An empty list here means nobody has reported color near a federal campground, not that there is none.
In the meantime: campgrounds under the darkest skies, campgrounds you can drive to without a reservation, or what changed this week.
Who is doing the looking
the tracker’s standing sourcesThe tracker reads state forestry agencies and state parks departments (Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Tennessee), state tourism boards (New Hampshire, New York, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Virginia, Georgia, Idaho), an academic observer (the Fall Color Guy at Appalachian State), and the PhenoCam Network’s canopy cameras. Whichever of them has filed a current report appears here, with the link to what they published.
The foliage tracker is More Than Just Parks’ own, not campanac’s. What this page adds is the join: which federal campgrounds each report actually covers, and how far the reporter was from the campsite. Everything else is somebody else’s fieldwork and is credited to them on the row it appears in.