10 Best Fall Foliage Webcams to Watch the Leaves Change

The best fall foliage webcams let you watch the leaves change from Maine to Colorado without leaving home, and they’re the quickest way to find out whether a leaf-peeping trip is on schedule. These ten live cams cover New England, the Adirondacks, the Smokies, Lake Superior country, Ontario and the Colorado aspens, and most of them sit among the live mountain webcams on the site. Check a few of them across the season and you’ll see the color move south and downhill, week by week.

New England Webcams for Fall Color

New England is where most leaf peepers start, and the far north goes first. According to Maine's state foliage program, northern Maine usually peaks in the last week of September and carries into the first week of October. The three cams below cover the state’s biggest lake, a Vermont covered bridge and the top of Mount Washington.

1. Moosehead Lake, Maine

The Moosehead Lake webcam looks out from the Blair Hill Inn, high above Greenville, across the largest lake in Maine. The lake runs close to 40 miles from north to south, and the camera takes in a long stretch of it, with wooded islands in the middle distance and a line of hills behind them.

Watch the foreground. It’s a slope of mixed hardwoods and spruce just below the inn, and the reds and oranges come in between the evergreens patch by patch. Greenville falls in what the state calls its western region, which usually reaches peak color around Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend, so this view keeps getting better after the far north has turned. More cams from the state are on our Maine webcams page.

Down in town, the Greenville Junction railcam points along the tracks past a red wooden depot, and the trees beside the line are some of the brightest on any cam in this list. It’s really a railfan camera, and if trains are your thing, our guide to the best railway webcams has more like it. Peak weekends fill up here, so it’s worth comparing places to stay in Greenville, Maine early.

2. Waitsfield Covered Bridge, Vermont

The Waitsfield webcam, run by Mad River Valley Television, looks at a wooden covered bridge in the middle of the village, with the river running under it and a big tree leaning over the water on the right. It’s about as Vermont as a camera gets.

That tree carries the show. It goes orange while the hillside behind it is still mostly green, and on a still day its color shows up again in the pool below the bridge. Cars stopping at the bridge entrance give you a sense of scale that the ski-area cams can’t. For a wider look at the Green Mountains, the Bolton Valley base-area cam faces a chairlift and a ski trail with a row of trees along the top of the slope, and the rest of the state is on our Vermont webcams page.

3. Mount Washington, New Hampshire

The Mount Washington webcam is the observatory’s deck cam, on the summit of the highest peak in the northeastern United States. The summit is bare rock above the treeline, so the color you’re looking at is below you, spread across the ridges and valleys of the White Mountains.

Pick a clear day for this one. When cloud sits on the summit, which it often does, the picture turns white, and the weather shown on the page is for the Glen House at the base, not the top. For a view from the valley floor, the Attitash Mountain Village cam in Bartlett and the North Conway village webcam both have hillsides behind them, and North Conway puts a mountain at the end of its main street.

The Adirondacks and Pennsylvania

Upstate New York turns early. Adirondack.net puts peak color in the High Peaks and Tri-Lakes region, which includes Lake Placid, between late September and early October, and the summits change before the valleys. Further south, the Fallingwater cam in Pennsylvania is a different kind of fall view: one famous house and the forest around it.

4. Mirror Lake, Lake Placid, New York

The Mirror Lake webcam faces across the small lake in the middle of Lake Placid village, with hotels along the far shore and a rounded, wooded hill rising behind them. Past that hill, higher Adirondack peaks show up on a clear day.

This is our favorite cam for color on a sunny morning. The hill across the water turns rust and orange from the top down, the lake is usually a deep blue, and the view is wide enough to follow the change as it creeps toward the shoreline. The lake takes its name from the way it reflects the mountains in calm weather, so wind-free mornings are the best time to look. Lake Placid is a small village, so hotels in Lake Placid are worth checking well before the peak weekends.

5. Fallingwater, Pennsylvania

The Fallingwater webcam looks at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house above the waterfall on Bear Run, in the Laurel Highlands near Mill Run and about 70 miles from Pittsburgh. Wright designed it in the 1930s for the Kaufmann family, and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy runs it today.

From the camera you get the classic view, with the stone terraces stacked over the falls and the forest pressing in on both sides. That forest is why it’s on this list. Fallingwater sits a long way south of the New England cams, so keep coming back to it as the season goes on, when the woods change around the house and the pale balconies stand out against them.

When does fall color reach the Smokies and the Blue Ridge?

Later than the north, and from the top down. The National Park Service says color usually develops above 4,000 feet in the Great Smoky Mountains from early to mid-October, while the lower and middle slopes are at their best between mid-October and early November. Up high, yellow birch and American beech are among the first trees to turn.

6. Gatlinburg SkyPark, Tennessee

The Gatlinburg webcam comes from Gatlinburg SkyPark, at Clayton’s Landing on top of the SkyLift, right above downtown. You look across a covered deck and patio toward the ridges of the Smokies, which rise almost straight out of town.

It’s a lively camera, with guests stepping off the lift and settling in at the tables while the mountains fill the background. Keep your eyes on the upper ridges, since they turn before the slopes near town. Gatlinburg sits about 39 miles southeast of Knoxville and is the gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and if you’d rather see those ridges in person, you can browse Great Smoky Mountains tours before you go.

7. Beech Mountain, North Carolina

The Beech Mountain webcam watches the resort entrance in the highest incorporated town east of the Rocky Mountains, at about 5,506 feet. That puts it well above the 4,000-foot line where the Smokies change first, so Beech should show color before the valley towns of the Blue Ridge.

It’s a road-and-trees view rather than a big panorama, and that makes it easy to read. When the trees across the entrance road go red and yellow, the high country is turning. You’ll find more cams from the state on our North Carolina webcams page.

Lake Superior Country and Ontario

Head west and north and the fall color comes with big water. Houghton sits on the Keweenaw Peninsula at the top of Michigan, and Parry Sound looks out over Georgian Bay, so on these two cams the color shows up along shorelines and on islands rather than across mountain ridges.

8. Michigan Tech, Houghton, Michigan

The Michigan Tech webcam looks over the campus of Michigan Technological University in Houghton, with the Keweenaw Waterway beyond the buildings and a long, forested shore on the far side.

Campus trees are the early warning. Oranges show up in the trees along the paths first, then the far shore follows. It’s a rooftop view, so you also get students crossing between buildings, and it feels less like a nature cam than a college town getting ready for winter. Our Michigan webcams page has the rest of the state, including more of the Upper Peninsula.

9. Parry Sound, Ontario

The Parry Sound webcam looks over the harbor on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, in the town known as the gateway to the Thirty Thousand Islands, about 140 miles north of Toronto. Canadian Shield rock and a wooded far shore frame the water.

Color arrives along the water’s edge and on the islands across the bay, and the harbor quiets down as the boating season winds up, which is its own sign that fall has come. There’s more from the province on our Ontario webcams page.

Colorado’s Aspens

Colorado runs on its own calendar. The color to watch for is the gold of the aspen groves, and it comes early: Crested Butte’s tourism office says it usually peaks in mid to late September, with leaves dropping in late October or early November. Nearby Kebler Pass has one of the country’s largest aspen groves.

10. Gothic, Colorado

The Gothic webcam looks north up the East River valley from Gothic, a tiny settlement above Crested Butte. The camera sits at the cabin of a long-time resident who has recorded the valley’s snow and weather every day since the mid-1970s, and his records have become a resource for scientists at the nearby Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

It’s the moodiest cam on this list. Cloud often hangs in the valley, the aspen stands on the right-hand slope glow gold while the spruce around them stays dark, and snow can dust the ground before the leaves are gone. Elsewhere in the state, the Telluride webcam and the Steamboat Square cam both have aspen on the slopes above town. If you want to drive Kebler Pass at peak, places to stay in Crested Butte make the obvious base, and the rest of the state is on our Colorado webcams page.

Worth Knowing Before You Watch

Fall color moves in two directions at once: from north to south, and from the summits down into the valleys. Adirondack.net explains that temperatures drop roughly 3 to 5 degrees for every 1,000 feet of elevation, and the colder nights up high are what tell the trees to change first, which is why ridge cams show color before town cams.

• Every cam here runs on Eastern Time except the three in Colorado, which are two hours behind.
• Late morning to mid-afternoon local time gives the best light. Early and late, the valleys sit in shadow and the color reads flat.
• Overcast skies wash color out on camera, and fog can hide a view for a whole morning, so check back before you decide a place hasn’t turned.
• Cams go offline, and lenses fog or get dirty. If one is down, try another in the same state.

If you like the mountain views here, our best mountain webcams guide covers peaks you can watch all year.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best fall foliage webcams to watch right now?

For early color, start with Moosehead Lake in Maine, Mirror Lake in Lake Placid and the aspens at Gothic, Colorado, which turn before most places. Then work south through the Vermont and New Hampshire cams, and finish in the Smokies with Gatlinburg and Beech Mountain, where the lower slopes are at their best into early November.

When is peak fall foliage in New England?

It depends on how far north you are. Maine’s foliage program says northern Maine usually peaks in the last week of September and the first week of October, while the coast and southern Maine peak from mid-October to the end of the month. Higher ground turns first, so mountain cams show color before the towns below them.

Can you see fall colors on a webcam at night?

Not really. Most fall foliage webcams are ordinary daylight cameras, so after sunset you’ll see streetlights, a dark lake or nothing at all. For color, look between late morning and mid-afternoon local time, and remember that the Colorado cams run two hours behind the ones in New England and the Smokies.

Why do mountains change color before valleys?

It’s the cold. Temperatures drop roughly 3 to 5 degrees for every 1,000 feet you climb, so nights on the summits get chilly first, and that’s the signal for the trees to shut down and change color. It’s also why the Smokies turn above 4,000 feet a few weeks before the lower slopes do.

Keep Watching as the Color Moves South

The nice thing about fall foliage webcams is that you don’t have to pick one weekend. Start with the northern lakes, keep an eye on the Vermont and White Mountains cams, and finish in the Smokies. When you want more, our Landscapes webcams cover forests, valleys and mountain views all year.