These Small Towns in Upstate New York Come Alive in Fall
On the first weekend of October, roughly 50,000 people descend on a Warren County village of about 4,000 to buy each other's used furniture. Two weeks earlier and 200 miles west, Naples holds a contest to crown the world's greatest grape pie. In mid-October, ski jumpers launch off an Olympic hill in Lake Placid with peak foliage filling the entire frame behind them. Autumn is when Upstate New York's small towns stop being quiet, and the calendar is tighter than most visitors realize. Foliage peaks in the Adirondacks in late September and early October, in the Finger Lakes and Catskills a week or two after that, and the festivals are timed to catch it.
Lake Placid
Ski jumping is a fall sport here. The Flaming Leaves Festival takes over the Olympic Jumping Complex in mid-October and doubles as the US Ski Jumping and Nordic Combined National Championships, which means competitors are sailing off a 128-meter hill while a crowd below works through food trucks, craft beer, and live music. The jumps run on artificial surfaces, so the season does not need snow.
Ride the elevator and SkyRide up the jump tower to the observation deck at the top. From there the Adirondack High Peaks stack up in every direction and John Brown's Farm sits in the foreground, and you are looking at the athletes' launch point from a few feet away. Lake Placid holds around 2,300 residents, and the village empties out between the summer hikers and the winter skiers, which makes early October the best-value week of the year to get a room on Mirror Lake.
Ticonderoga
Two oxen named Mick and Mack are the headliners. Fort Ticonderoga's Heritage, Harvest and Horse Festival, held on a Saturday in early October, puts working animals to work: oxen hauling, draft horses in harness, and the Green Mountain Hounds demonstrating a foxhunt. It runs in the King's Garden among heirloom apple trees, with a farmers market, horse-drawn wagon rides, and a six-acre corn maze cut with clues drawn from the fort's own history.
The setting does a lot of the work. The fort sits above Lake Champlain with the Adirondacks behind it and Vermont's Green Mountains across the water, so you get two states' worth of color from one set of ramparts. Carillon boat cruises run during the festival. One scheduling note: the fort is open for daily visitation May through October only, so the site of the 1775 capture shuts for the season right as the leaves finish.
Cooperstown
Cooperstown in September is Cooperstown with the baseball crowds gone. Induction weekend is a July problem; by harvest season Main Street belongs to people who actually want to look at things. The Farmers' Museum runs its Harvest Festival in mid-September, working a nineteenth-century agricultural village through the actual jobs of the season, with cider pressing, threshing, and draft animals doing what draft animals did.
Otsego Lake is what James Fenimore Cooper called Glimmerglass, and the name earns itself on a still morning in October when the hills come down to the waterline in full color. The village holds fewer than 2,000 people. Walk the grounds at Fenimore Art Museum and Hyde Hall, then note that most of the lakeside attractions wind down by late October.
Canandaigua
Canandaigua means the chosen spot in Seneca, and the Victorians who built Sonnenberg agreed. The gardens and mansion at Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park run to roughly 50 acres of nineteenth-century landscape design, and the Italian Garden and Japanese Garden read very differently in October than they do in June. The estate closes for the season in the fall, so check the calendar before driving out.
For altitude, the Bristol Mountain Sky Ride runs chairlift trips to the summit on fall weekends, about 14 miles south of town, and the ridge gives you the southern Finger Lakes in one sweep. Book ahead; the foliage weekends sell out. Canandaigua sits at the north end of its lake, which puts it at the top of a valley full of vineyards, and the wineries along both shores run harvest and crush events through September and October.
Naples
There is a pie in this village made of Concord grapes, and people drive hours for it. Irene Bouchard started selling grape pies in Naples in the middle of the last century, partly to make use of a crop the wineries did not want, and a cottage industry grew up around her. Cindy's Pies, Jeni's Pies at Joseph's Wayside Market, Arbor Hill Grapery, and Monica's Pies all trade on it. Monica Schenk has retired but traditionally reopens for one weekend a year.
That weekend is the Naples Grape Festival, held over two days in late September on the town hall and school grounds since 1961, and it draws tens of thousands to a village of about 1,000. The centerpiece is the World's Greatest Grape Pie Contest. There is also a New York wine tent, grape stomping, and several hundred craft vendors. Admission is free, parking is not simple, and a shuttle usually runs.
Above town, Gannett Hill in Ontario County Park is the highest point in the county, and the overlook known as the Jump Off drops away into the Bristol Hills. It is the best free foliage view in the southern Finger Lakes.
Catskill
American landscape painting was invented four blocks from Catskill's Main Street. Thomas Cole built his career at Cedar Grove, now the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, painting the Catskill Mountains across the river and founding what became the Hudson River School. His student Frederic Church built Olana on a hilltop just across the Hudson near Hudson, and designed the whole property as a composition. Both are open through the fall, and both were sited specifically for the view you came to see.
Kaaterskill Falls, in the mountains west of the village, drops about 260 feet in two tiers and is the waterfall Cole and his circle painted more than any other. For a lift instead of a hike, the Scenic Skyride at Hunter Mountain, roughly 20 miles west, runs on autumn weekends. The Catskills tend to peak in mid-October, a beat behind the Adirondacks, which makes this a workable second trip if you missed the north.
Picking Your Weekend
These towns do not all peak at once, and treating Upstate New York as a single leaf-peeping season is how people end up on brown hillsides. The Adirondacks go first, which puts Lake Placid, Warrensburg, and Ticonderoga in the last week of September and the first of October, and conveniently stacks the garage sale, the horse festival, and the ski jumping into the same fortnight. The Finger Lakes and the Catskills follow, so Naples, Canandaigua, and Catskill hold their color into mid and late October. New York State runs a weekly foliage report through the season, and it is worth reading before you book anything. The other constraint is closing dates: Fort Ticonderoga, Sonnenberg, and most of the chairlifts and boat cruises shut down between late October and early November, so the last good weekend for a full day out is earlier than the last good weekend for leaves.
