The Colors of Fall by Jerry and Marcy Monkman

	Every September and October, several million people flock to New England simply to look at leaves. It is a notable event in an era when cell phones and the internet define our pace of life, and when extreme sports and adventure travel lure more and more people into the outdoors. Yes, some of these millions come to scale granite walls or paddle a frothy stretch of whitewater, but most come to walk and sit, and to stare at leaves so brilliant that they are not described as red, yellow, and brown, but scarlet, gold, and bronze. During the peak of this color display, it is easy to inadvertently hold your breath while taking in the sight of a landscape seemingly on fire, but where the only smoke is a wisp of early morning fog rising from a small mountain pond.
	In this book, we offer our photographs as a celebration of fall in New England ’s wild places, places where the climate, forests, and topography combine to create some of the most colorful fall foliage in the world. This celebration provides an intimate look at a season that has a beauty that goes deeper than the hillsides of red and yellow that you can see from the windows of a tour bus on Vermont ’s Route 100 or New Hampshire ’s Kancamagus Highway . It is a beauty that is not just “out there,” but “in there,” waiting to be discovered by those who venture into the landscape. For us, fall in New England is about stunning views from bald granite domes, but it is just as much about rocky forest trails covered in a carpet of red maple leaves and of rivers reflecting the colors of sugar maples and taking on the look of molten gold.
	In the following pages, we will briefly talk about how nature has created New England ’s fall colors with volcanoes and glaciers, chlorophyll and carotene, but primarily we leave you to explore the season through our images. We feel privileged to have spent more than a dozen fall seasons making these photographs and even more privileged to be able to share them with you now. Enjoy!