Manitoba missing an opportunity by not promoting places to see glorious fall colours

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This article was published 29/09/2014 (4403 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ahh, fall… that glorious season when coffee shops sell pumpkin-spice everything and the leaves turn brilliant shades that line our streets with dazzling colour.

But don’t expect to find a guide to fall colours in Manitoba, well, pretty much anywhere. While eastern Canadian tourism agencies spend hours of time and fill page after page of glossy magazine guides with where to see the best of the resplendent red maples and golden yellow elms, Manitoba’s beautiful autumn gets short shrift.

In the Ottawa area at this time of year, Gatineau Park is packed with people for Fall Rhapsody, a month-long festival with family activities and even three-hour guided bus tours of the best viewing spots in the park.

Ontario Tourism provides several websites where travellers can find out how many trees in a particular provincial park have changed colour and what percentage of the leaves has already fallen to the ground.

In Algonquin Park, for example, 90 per cent of the leaves have already changed but only 10 per cent have fallen, leaving a rich mix of gold and orange and red.

Cynthia Cohlmeyer, a landscape architect with Cohlmeyer Architecture, said fall colours in Manitoba are just as gorgeous as elsewhere, but less prominent, as they are usually harder to find because of agriculture and urban development.

“The flood plain forest is beautiful, but we’ve just completely wiped the slate clean,” she said.

In the city of Winnipeg, there is nothing more beautiful than the elm tree-lined streets of neighbourhoods such as River Heights and Fort Garry, said Cohlmeyer, but they all turn yellow or gold. To find the rich mix of yellows and oranges and reds, one must look further, such as along the Assiniboine River, where cranberries and pin cherries are found.

“You have to look carefully and you have to look frequently,” said Cohlmeyer.

Leaves are the food factory for trees, using the process known as photosynthesis to create glucose that feeds the tree and keeps it alive. The chlorophyll in the leaves that helps with photosynthesis is also what gives leaves their green colour. As summer fades into fall, and the days get shorter and colder, trees prepare for winter by sucking all the glucose back into their roots for storage. There isn’t enough light or heat in winter for photosynthesis, so as squirrels store acorns, trees store their glucose.

At this time the leaves also lose their chlorophyll, stripping them of their dominant green colour. In most trees, the orange and yellow colours of their fall leaves are always there but are hidden by the dominance of the green in the chlorophyll. In some, such as red maples, the glucose turns the leaves red.

Manitoba has no such website to tell people where to find the best leaves or when. A search on the Travel Manitoba website for “fall colours” nets one entry for the Fall Festival of Colours, taking place in Pine Falls until Oct. 5, and then a few entries for polar bears in Churchill amid “Arctic fall colours.”

Cohlmeyer said the best viewing time for fall leaves really depends on the weather. This year, because the summer was so wet and coolish, fall started early and the colour changes of the leaves are pretty much complete already.

Many leaves don’t last long once they have changed, though some, such as the birch and aspen near Victoria Beach, will stay golden for several weeks, said Cohlmeyer.

She said it would be a great idea for Travel Manitoba to market fall colour viewing opportunities.

Like much of Winnipeg, said Cohlmeyer, the best fall colour spots are often hidden gems.

“It’s kind of a metaphor for the city,” she said.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca