People ask me, at the desk and in my inbox, when the aspens turn in Frisco. The honest answer is that they turn when they decide to, and this year a few of them decided in the first week of September. You can see it from Main Street if you look up at the right slope: one tree gone gold in a crowd of green, like somebody who left the party early and is standing outside being right about it. Give it two weeks. Then the whole valley will be the color of the thread.
What September is actually like at nine thousand feet
September is the month the town belongs to the people who live in it. The summer crowd has gone home, the ski crowd has not yet thought about us, and for five or six weeks Frisco, Colorado is what it was built to be: a small town beside a lake, under a mountain, with a creek running through it. Mornings start near freezing and afternoons climb into the sixties. The light comes in low and gold and stays that way most of the day, which is the light the whole house is named for. The nights are already cold enough that the first fire of the season stops being a question.
If you are wondering whether to come in September or wait for the leaves, come in September. The peak of the color is usually the last week of the month into the first days of October, and it is worth seeing, but the quiet before it is the part nobody photographs and the part I would not trade.
Peaches on the bridge
These photographs are from a bicycle ride along the Tenmile Creek recpath, the paved trail that follows the creek out of town toward Copper Mountain. It is flat enough for a person carrying a bag of peaches and a bouquet of dried flowers, and pretty enough that I stopped on the first bridge and did not get much further. The peaches are the last of the Colorado season. The flowers will spend the winter in a jar at the front desk.
That is the whole lesson of the off-season, if it has one. The town is not different in September. I am. There is finally room to stop on the bridge.
If you are here this month
- Ride or walk the Tenmile recpath in the morning, before the wind. The first bridge out of town is the one in these pictures. Keep going and the aspens thicken.
- Look up on Main Street. The early gold is on the slopes above town, and it changes daily. By the last week of September the whole ridge goes.
- Buy peaches while there are peaches. The Colorado season ends about now. A bag of them in a bike basket is the correct way to carry them.
- Bring a real coat. September afternoons are warm and September nights are not. This is the month the fireplaces come back on.
- Listen to something quiet. The house's podcast is made here in the early mornings, and the newest episode, The Water Between Places, opens with these exact aspens.
Where this fits in the house
I write and make a podcast from Frisco, at a front desk, before anyone is awake. The town is the setting of Still, by Design., a novel about a man who moves to a beautiful place believing it will fix him, and the setting of most of the essays. The places of those essays are drawn as constellations in the Sky. If September in Frisco sounds like something you would like to hear about when it happens, rather than after, the correspondence is the door. The house writes when there is news, and the aspens count.