After an appointment yesterday, I officially joined the ranks of ‘leaf peepers’ as I wandered on some back roads looking for autumn color. With the dry summer, the colors are not as bright or as red as some years but once in a while you still find a pretty spot or two. Course when I’m ‘leaf peeping”, I hate to share the road so I can stop for a picture and therefore try to find less traveled roads.

And this ‘road’ is less traveled, which is a good thing since it is only wide enough for one vehicle at a time. And while the picture makes the road appear flat, the road is very steep, climbing about two hundred and twenty feet in a quarter of a mile so when stopping to take this picture, I tried to keep the car slowly moving ahead instead coming to full stop.

Looking out the driver side window, you see the sharp drop to the valley below and you wonder how the trees are even able to grow on the rocky, steep wall. The passenger side window reveals the steep rocky wall continuing upwards with only this narrow path cutting through.

I didn’t want to see how good my brakes were, so I went up the trail instead of coming down it. But worse is when you do meet someone else and one of you have to ‘backup’. I was lucky this time as I met no other vehicles but I did last year but was lucky that I was already was at the one spot where it is wide enough for two vehicles as I had parked to take some pictures of the rocks, otherwise it wouldn’t have been such a peaceful drive backing up and picturing myself as a little crumbled speck on the valley floor below.

Up an Autumn Trail