As autumn progresses, if you want to know when and where you can still view fall foliage at its spectacular best, your computer can help you find out. It can also lead you into a tinselly world dominated by advertising and promotion where the aim is more to sell than inform.
To test, I turned first to America Online, the subscription service. At the suggestion of a blurb on the home page that day, I typed in the keyword “Fall Getaways.” That produced a page headlined “Great Fall Getaways,” with an ad for Starbucks coffee in the lower left corner. The pages that followed contained a few getaway suggestions from supposed readers but consisted largely of commercials: for 20 mountain resorts, for Oktoberfest in Germany and Austria, and for such amusement parks as Knott’s Berry Farm, Six Flags Great Aventure (sic) and Walt Disney World. A link led to the on-line booking agency Preview Travel, with which AOL is allied.
One subsection, “Fall Across the U.S.,” was more helpful. It led to calendars of events, suggested driving tours and appropriate phone numbers for several states, but it took a lot of mouse clicking and time to get there.
Later, just to see what might happen, I returned to the AOL keyword box and typed in “Fall Foliage.” That produced an entirely different–and much more useful–set of links. They included a wealth of information on the half-month-to-half-month progression of autumn colors across the country, toll-free hot lines to call for updates, a selection of foliage Web sites, and local and regional weather news. Why, I wondered, couldn’t AOL have steered me there in the first place. (I think I know the answer.)
When I attempted to find fall foliage information on the subscription service CompuServe, which has been acquired by AOL but still operates independently, I struck out. Using the “go” feature (CompuServe’s equivalent of “keyword”), I typed in “Go: Fall Foliage.” The response: “No items were found.” Then I asked for a thorough search of the Internet, I was told there were 17,647 relevant sites. Ten of them were described, mostly of companies selling fall flowers or plants and none about scenic views.
Surfing the World Wide Web was likewise time-consuming and often frustrating, though ultimately bountiful. I turned first to AOL NetFind (www.aol.com/netfind), a so-called search engine, or sort of electronic card catalog. Its first choice that day was the highly informative site of Harris Mountaintop (see below), set up as largely as a public service. The second choice was an archery sales list, including “fall foliage” bows available at Bucky’s Sports Shop in Duncan, British Columbia.
(Two weeks later, however, all the choices were more pertinent, illustrating how much the Internet is subject to change. The choices included foliage calendars, maps and detailed travel information for Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont.)
The first choice on the search engine Lycos (www.lycos.com), meanwhile, was “Fall foliage in Boise Cascade’s hardwood forests in central Maine.” This was simply a photo of a tree with scarlet leaves. A link led to Boise Cascade’s corporate pages. A day later I tried Lycos again. This time the first choice was a commercial for the fall foliage outings of Northeastern Motorcycle Tours of Brattleboro, Vt.
Infoseek (www.infoseek.com), another search engine, presented a potpourri of links, including a fall foliage guide to Vermont. Webcrawler (www.webcrawler.com) offered foliage suggestions for Orlando, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Dallas, Paris, Beijing and Fall River, Mass. Yahoo’s (www.yahoo.com) first choice was a foliage site for Maine.
To spare you readers the four hours that all this surfing took me, I suggest, first, that if you use a search engine, be as specific as possible in your request. For example, when I narrowed my request in AOL NetFind to “fall foliage and Colorado and weather and week and drive,” I was quickly led to the Colorado Outdoors Page (http://www.csn.net/(tilde)arthurvb/colo rado/colorado.html), which provided just about all the outdoor recreational travel information I could possibly want on the Colorado Rockies.
Here are foliage sites that I found particularly useful:
– United States Forest Service Fall Foliage Hotline (www.fs.fed.us/recreation/fall.htm). Just what its name implies: all the latest news as autumn progresses in the national forests.
– “Fall Foliage on the Web” (www.mtp.semi.harris.com/fall.html). A service of Harris Mountaintop, a Web site of the Harris Corp., maker of semiconductors, which has headquarters in Mountaintop, Pa. Links lead to many state foliage sites, to an academic discussion of why leaves change color, and to maps and trip planners.
– Yankee Magazine’s “Foliage Central” (www.newengland.com/foliage/index.html). Maps, hot line numbers, suggested driving tours and a forum for discussing foliage travel plans with editors and readers of the New England monthly.
– Stormfax Guide to Fall Foliage (www.stormfax.com/foliage.htm). Phone numbers of state foliage hot lines in 21 states.
– National Scenic Byways official site (www.byways.org). Sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration and managed by the National Scenic Byways Online project at Utah State University, this site describes the American roads designated as “scenic byways” by federal and state authorities.
– Great Outdoor Recreation Pages (www.gorp.com). At this writing, each fall foliage link had a rusty leaf beside it. The links led to information on the Great Smokies, Vermont, the Ozarks, the Michigan upper peninsula, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Colorado’s Cache La Poudre River.
– NetGuide’s Autumn Links (www.netguide.com/special/autumn.html). Fall foliage, movies, books, fashions and much more. The site is produced by Noah Vadnai, a widely traveled twentysomething Internet enthusiast of CMP Media Inc., a publisher of technology information.
– America Online’s Independent Traveler (keyword: IT). Links to fall foliage hot lines, maps and Web sites, plus personal travel reports on Vermont.
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Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com
