Aspen Ablaze on Butterfield Peaks up Middle Canyon: One of my favorite places to see aspen is up in the Butterfield Peaks area of Middle Canyon. Once you head up the ridge that starts at Butterfield Pass, you get some amazing views of the aspen at their most striking. The trail to the peaks has some rocky and difficult patches but you are rewarded with some wonderful shady areas towards the top. Also along the 9,000+ elevation ridge are patches of aspen where you can walk through tunnels of yellow.
Aspen Tunnel along Butterfield Peaks: Just over the ridge, you get a majestic view of the southern Oquirrhs. Kelsey and Lowe Peak dominate this view as the shadows come early along these peaks during the shortened autumn days. If you want to see the sun shining on the peaks, you need to get up there early.
Shaded Lowe Peak with illuminated aspen in the foreground: One of the keys to enjoying autumn is not to wait. It will all end faster than you think. One cold front with a warm south wind preceding it can bring down 70% of the leaves. As the years go by, I realize the number of autumns I can enjoy decreases by one every year. Who knows how many of those years I will have the ability to get to the ridges that provide such striking views. For those of us living in the autumn of our lives, there is something poignant about the beauty of early fall and the stark cold of late fall. The beauty is out there. Don’t miss it. Autumn, like our very lives, dissipates too fast.
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Loading...As the summer heat begins to dissipate, what happens every year happens in our mountains and spreads to our valleys.
Trees and bushes sense the longer nights and shorter days and shut down for the year.
The display they leave before the leaves fall is variable depending on the quality of the water year. Even so, a below average water year can have some amazing color when you catch the leaves with the right angle of the sun.
Nothing signifies the coming cold to me as the glow of aspen as they illuminate in the sharpened angle of the autumn sun.
The sound and smell of the leaves is something I never tire of. The sound of a cool autumn wind dropping thousands of aspen leaves is as systematic of the fall to me as a football game at Rice/Eccles or Lavell Edwards stadium.
