Every September, Spearfish passes around the same number. Someone posts it in a group chat, someone else mentions it at the coffee shop on Main Street, and by the weekend half the town is repeating a single percentage as if it means the same thing everywhere along the byway. It doesn't. The number that shows up in the Spearfish Area Chamber of Commerce's weekly Fall Color Report is an average pulled from nineteen miles of canyon that do not change at the same speed, and treating it like a single readout is how people end up driving the wrong five minutes of Highway 14A.
If you've lived here through a few autumns, you already sense this. The stretch closest to town looks spectacular one week and picked clean the next, while deeper into the canyon the color is just getting started. This piece is about that gap, and about the small planning habit that actually makes use of it.
What the Number Is Actually Measuring
The person behind the report is Kimberly Talcott, a Spearfish-based freelance writer who has been tracking leaf change in the canyon since 2020. She drives and hikes the byway several times a week each fall, then files updates through the Chamber and Visit Spearfish, with the fuller version of each report landing on her own site, spearfishcanyonreports.com. It's a real, sustained local practice, not a one-time press release, which is why the reports read less like a press release and more like field notes.
Talcott's own explanation of what's driving the change is straightforward:
"We're getting longer nights and less daylight, and cooler temperatures."
That's the mechanism. What her reports also show, week after week, is that the mechanism doesn't hit every part of the canyon on the same schedule. Elevation, exposure to wind, and even which side of the creek a tree sits on all shift the timing. The single number is a summary of a moving, uneven picture.
One Date, One Big Jump
Here's how uneven. In the 2025 season, the color report pegged the canyon at 50 percent change on September 16, the same calendar date as today. By the time Talcott filed her final report of that season, in the first days of October, the canyon had jumped to 90 percent, with color already described as past its peak in some stretches.
| Date (2025 season) | Reported color change | What the report noted |
|---|---|---|
| September 16 | 50% | Devil's Bathtub area showing early orange |
| Early October (final report) | 90% | Peak already passed; leaf drop underway at the canyon mouth |
That's roughly two and a half weeks to go from halfway there to nearly finished. If this season tracks anything like last year's, today marks the early-middle of the process, not a good stopping point for judging the whole drive by what you see near town.
The Order Along Fourteen-A
The same final report that clocked the canyon at 90 percent also drew a clear line between two parts of the byway. Leaf drop was already heavy at the mouth of the canyon, the stretch closest to Spearfish, and just south of Devil's Bathtub. Meanwhile, Talcott's favorite spots that same week were south of Rim Rock Lodge and south of 11th Hour, both well deeper into the canyon.
That pattern shows up across seasons, not just once. Working roughly from the Spearfish end toward Savoy and Cheyenne Crossing, here's the rough order the reports describe:
- Devil's Bathtub and the canyon mouth tend to show color early and lose it early, since this stretch takes the most wind and sits at the lowest elevation.
- Botany Bay and the area south of Bridal Veil Falls often reach near-peak color around the same time as the mouth, but hold slightly longer.
- Split Rock, Kissing Rocks, and Maurice Intake sit in the middle of the byway and tend to lag a few days behind the mouth.
- 11th Hour Gulch and Rim Rock Lodge, deeper into the canyon, are consistently where Talcott points people once the mouth has already started dropping leaves.
- Long Valley Picnic Area shows a mix of ground-level color, purple and lime shrubs against limestone cliffs, that develops on its own timeline separate from the birch and aspen overhead.
- Savoy and the area around Spearfish Canyon Lodge, the deepest and highest stretch on the drive, is where color often lingers longest into the season.
The practical upshot is simple. If your fall drive is a quick loop near the highway entrance because it's convenient, you're seeing the part of the canyon that peaks first and fades first. The payoff for going the full nineteen miles, especially in the back half of the season, is that Savoy and Rim Rock Lodge are often still holding color after the mouth has already dropped.
A Window, Not a Date
Across multiple seasons, Talcott's reports and local coverage have placed peak color in a fairly consistent window, roughly September 23 through October 4. That window isn't fixed to the calendar so much as it's fixed to weather. In 2025, above-average rainfall meant the trees weren't drought-stressed heading into fall, which Talcott flagged as a reason the season might run later than usual that year. Warm, dry stretches speed things up. Wet years can push the whole process back by several days.
That's the real argument for checking the report weekly instead of picking one Saturday months in advance and hoping. The Chamber's reports, along with Talcott's own site, are the closest thing Spearfish has to a live instrument for this, and they're the only sources that update inside the season itself rather than describing it after the fact.
Closing the Loop Downtown
The other half of how residents actually spend one of these fall Saturdays happens after the drive, back on Main Street. The newest stop in that rotation is Six Goats Tavern, which opened in April 2026 in the historic Lown Mercantile Building on North 5th Street. Owners Brad Prescott and Chris Panaia built it as a ranch-inspired steakhouse with an eye on local history, pulling decorative pieces from the building's own basement during the renovation.
It joins a downtown food scene that already had its regulars. Killian's Food & Drink, on West Jackson Boulevard, has built a following partly on a rotating seventeen-tap craft beer list alongside its steaks and burgers. A few blocks over on North Main Street, Nonna's Kitchen has carved out its own following for Italian food and craft cocktails.
None of these places require the canyon drive to be worth visiting on their own. But for a lot of Spearfish residents, the two are linked by habit: spend the afternoon working your way down 14A toward Savoy, then close the loop with dinner back in town. The newest addition just gives that second half of the routine one more option than it had a year ago.
The Season Repeats, the Details Don't
None of this changes year to year in any dramatic way. The canyon will turn again this fall the way it has every fall Talcott has been tracking it, and the report will publish its percentages the way it always does. What's worth carrying into this particular September is that the number in that report is a summary, not a map, and the parts of the byway closest to town are rarely the parts holding color the longest.
That kind of granular, weekly-updated local knowledge is exactly the sort of thing that's easy to miss if you're new here and easy to take for granted if you're not. Real Properties of Lead Deadwood works across Spearfish and the rest of the Northern Hills, and paying attention to the small, specific things that make each town run, from a canyon's leaf schedule to which building just got a new tenant, is part of how we stay useful to the people who already call this place home. If you ever want to talk through what's happening in your corner of the Black Hills, reach out and speak with a local neighborhood expert.
