A rainy September has translated into a colorful October as Iowa’s trees are well on the way to showing the reds, oranges, yellows and golds of autumn.
Joe Herring, a district forester with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says it could be an ideal weekend ahead for taking a nice, long drive to see the splendor of fall.
“Maples are turning. We started to see the hickories turning just recently here in the last week or so, and for a few weeks now, we’ve been seeing a lot of the early changing species like walnut, cottonwood, elm, ironwood, turning yellow,” Herring says. “Some of the species that turned that really pretty crimson or scarlet color like our Virginia creeper vines and our sumacs, they’ve been changing for a few weeks now, too.”
Temperatures are expected to plummet tonight into the 20s and 30s, which could prompt an escalation in the state’s fall color show.
Herring says, “I think we are going to see the peak of fall color here sometime in the next five or ten days.”
The National Weather Service has posted a Freeze Warning for 80 Iowa counties, with the rest under either freeze watches or frost advisories.
