In 2010, I didn’t have enough photos to do a Fall Colours essay, requiring me to suspend what had become an annual tradition: this gap was caused by the colours not coming out until very late, after the end of the Celtic Colours festival, and the weather being too poor for photography when they did finally turn. I am happy to say that this situation did not occur this year, whose weather was easily the best for Celtic Colours since 2006. This year’s colours were generally spectacular, especially in the back country, with abundant reds and, most times, there was enough sun to make them dazzling. Although I did not take close to the number of photos in past years (only 1230 in total during my October trip, of which 583 survived as initial candidates for this essay), I did get what I judge to be some fine shots and so had no problem in finding material for this essay. Indeed, the opposite problem was resolved by extending the essay from 40 to 45 pages!

This essay’s photos are mostly presented in the order in which I visited the places from which they were taken; in two cases, I have grouped photos together that were taken from several different locations. All four of Cape Breton’s counties are represented, though the vast majority of the photos this year are from Inverness and Victoria Counties (22 and 19 pages, respectively). I had hoped to see more of Eastern Cape Breton than I did, particularly the gorgeous Atlantic coast in Richmond and Cape Breton Counties, but I cancelled the trip I had planned there because the day I had free for it was too overcast to produce the photos I had hoped to get. Still, I did manage to see a good deal of the island, in no small part because Celtic Colours concerts are held all over the island, in small as well as larger communities, the travel to and from which afforded me opportunities to get photos along the way.

The photos in this essay are not all of leaves, though you will certainly see more than a few of those. But, in each photo, you will see the fall colours in the grasses and on the hillsides; if you look closely, you will see that nearly every one could only have been taken in the autumn, though sometimes the changes are subtle. Most of them come from places that have appeared in previous essays; a few are from newly discovered vantage points—Cape Breton still has many roads and trails I have not not yet explored!

I hope you will enjoy the photos I have selected and the accompanying text.

Victor Maurice Faubert
2011 October 29

Because it was written so recently, I have made only stylistic changes to the text of this essay; the minimal other changes arise from making its layout conform to that of the other revised essays.

Victor Maurice Faubert
2012 April 20

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Note 1: If you are unfamiliar with the place names mentioned in this essay, a list of map resources is given here. Of these, the best computer-readable map of Cape Breton Island that I currently know about is the Cape Breton Travel Map, produced by Destination Cape Breton and, thanks to their express written permission, available as a PDF file here; I strongly urge you to download it. This map scales nicely, allowing you to zoom in on an area of interest, has a very helpful place name index, and provides a level of detail, both of back roads and streams, that is quite good.

Note 2: See the description here for the notation I use for GPS (Global Positioning System) coördinates, which are those I wrote down when I took the photos. I did not have a GPS device when I took the photos in this essay; the coördinates found here are those written down on later trips or computed from Google Maps; when no coördinate is given, I have been unable to reconstruct where I was exactly when the photo was taken.

Feedback on the photos and the accompanying commentary, including corrections, is always welcome; send it to the address in the footer below. All of the essays in this series are archived here.

To read this essay in sequence, click the “First” link in the footer below (or in the navigation bar at the top of the page) and the “Next” link in each subsequent page’s footer or navigation bar. Click the “Essay Index” link in the footer or navigation bar to see thumbnails of all of the photos appearing at the top of a page in the essay; you may click on any thumbnail to move directly to that page of the essay, perhaps resuming your reading where you left off on a previous visit or searching the essay for a particular topic or main photo. You may return to the introduction by clicking the essay title link in the navigation bar at the top of this or any subsequent page.