Our colorful, new perfect Fall

Huckleberries gone wild on CDT near Rogers Pass

Near the CDT trail head

At North Highwood Creek junction

Morell Falls

A solitary larch on Salmon Lake

 Fall this year has made up for the past two autumns where we saw heavy, early October snowfalls that withered foliage.

We are basking in one of the most beautiful Fall seasons in memory.

Where the cottonwoods are usually stripped bare along the Missouri and Sun rivers by Oct. 15, this year those trees are a brilliant yellow almost a week later.

At the same time, the western larch on the west side of the Continental Divide seem to be ahead of schedule, spangling the hillsides above the spectacular Swan Valley lakes.

Over the past week we've enjoyed several trips to see the color:

• Morell Falls about 7 miles northeast of Seeley Lake
• Rodgers Peak off Rogers Pass on the Continental Divide Trail
  
• White Wolf-North Fork Highwood Creek in the Highwood Mountains
• Mount Helena
  

Morell Falls is heavily used and part of the National Recreation Trail System.  It has been heavily burned, but that has opened up vistas of high Swan Range peaks like Crescent and Pyramid mountains.  The Falls, a 3-mile one-way hike with little elevation gain, are worth seeing.  We enjoyed large patches of larch.  On the drive to the trailhead we stopped at Salmon Lake to see the larch-in-color show.  We took a side trip to see the biggest Western Larch, 153 feet tall, at the Big Larch Campground at Seeley.

The ground cover off Rogers Pass toward Rodgers Peak was dominated by brilliant red huckleberry bushes.

The aspen in the Highwoods were past their prime, but still beautiful.  Some aspen groves were stripped of their leaves, others were still bright green, but there were enough groves of bright yellow that made the trip worthwhile.

We did a traverse on Mount Helena going up the old limestone gulch to the west and gaining the top via the back ridge and coming back down on the 1906 trail.  The views were quite clear from the top, all the way to Red Mountain, the highest point in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.  Below us the aspen and cottonwoods along Ten Mile and Prickly Pear creeks lit up the valley.