Fall Is in the Air : California autumn has its own personality, marked by changes in weather, landscape and harvests.

Easterners who come West seem to bring an attitude about seasons. They like to confide to us natives and old-timers that they miss four definite seasons, especially fall. They tell us our climatic cycle is too subtle, even boring, that our seasons can’t be real if they don’t show gross changes. Even folks who came here to escape harsh winters profess to miss the snow.

But with that mind-set could those people be overlooking something? Admittedly not like those east of the Rockies, California seasons may have their own definition and personality. Maybe there is more to autumn than wailing winds, naked woods and meadows brown and sere--those fine themes of traditional literature.

With fall due on the calendar in a few days, we will soon be seeing changes in weather, landscape and harvests. Such signs will be just as marked as the rustling dry leaves and fireplace weather that proclaim fall Back East.

Take the wind. Fall’s most prominent feature is the brisk northeasterly Santa Ana, down from the desert. The long-term record shows it usually begins at the end of September and more than half of all episodes occur from then through December.

The earliest Santa Anas bring air temperatures hotter than any in summer, but later on they will be cooler. Whenever they blow, their low humidity can turn brush fires into firestorms. They also bring sparkling clear air and visibility to the farthest horizons of any that can be seen in the year. October’s bright blue weather, California style. On such days you can see across the broad San Fernando Valley from the Sepulveda Pass. From other heights the most distant mountain peaks and islands offshore stand out.

In another mood, an occasional high-velocity Santa Ana will blow Mojave Desert real estate horizontally across the Valley toward the sea. Then our sky turns dust yellow.

Santa Ana frequency usually peaks in December, a statistic that means Christmas trees on sales lots often turn tinder-dry overnight. The canny shopper will either go to a Christmas tree farm and cut his own fresh, or select a tree newly off the truck from Northern California and keep it moist and out of the wind until it is up and decorated.

Cool air, another fall symptom, arrives without preamble some September afternoon when you notice a nip to the prevailing breeze. Settling in gradually, over a longer period than in the East, autumn cooling means sessions of stagnant air circulation, of murk and overcast. When a Santa Ana interrupts the pattern, its sudden warmth inspires Easterners to talk of Indian summer. As days get noticeably shorter, sweaters appear in football crowds but--except in jest--never a raccoon coat. The fall cool-down comes sooner up in the mountains, for a gain in altitude is like a move northward in climate.

Then one day, sometimes with little warning, gray skies open up to start autumn’s second most prominent feature, the rainy season. With luck it will begin in November or December.

After the first soaking rains, new grass spreads a hint of green on hillsides. Soon in the canyons you note a California specialty, a carpet of intensely green grass under bright fall leaf color on stream-side trees. In a few more weeks, new leaves appear on elderberry, walnut and other native trees. “Spring” surges to life just as the calendar winter gets under way, and the English poet’s “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” now sounds odd.

Storms that bring rain to the lowlands produce another sign of fall as Los Angeles’ high mountain backdrop gets its first dusting of white. Snow is then an option. Those who feel nostalgia to be in it have only to seek it out.

Some special visitors come in fall for our mild winter. In much of the East, geese sailing high are over-flying. Here they alight at their destination. The first scouts, lone male Canada geese, show up in mid-October. By month-end, squadrons of the great honkers fly in vee formations to such Valley winter refuges as Sepulveda Basin, Chatsworth Lake and the Encino and Van Norman reservoirs. Wait some morning at first light in the fields of Pierce College in Woodland Hills to see and hear gabbling flocks drop in for a breakfast graze after a night on the water.

The natural landscape responds to autumn with deepening earth tones on grass-clad hills. Those range from grays beside the sea through tans and yellows to a warm breakfast-toast hue. Beside creeks and ponds, cattails turn brown, then collapse in the water until spring’s new growth. We don’t see much goldenrod, but mounding rabbitbrush brightens roadsides and meadows in the San Gabriel Mountains with a whitish-gold just as mellow and autumnal.

Drying shrub and tree flowers streak chaparral slopes with fall colors. Starting in summer at low elevations, they spread to higher mountains through autumn. The showiest are buckwheat in rust red, redshank in yellow ocher and chamise, laurel sumac and toyon in shades of cinnamon and chocolate. Then by late November, the toyon sports clusters of those bright red berries that inspire its common names: California holly and Christmas berry.

Fall color on trees, never as pervasive as in the East, is a surprise to those who expect none at all in this Mediterranean climate. Its onset is never precise; its performance is always capricious. Trees may turn color or lose leaves in parts of a canyon or mountainside while the same species in other parts are still green. Each responds in timing and color to one or more such triggers as shorter daylight hours, an absence of rain, cooling nights, a touch of frost.

One of the first trees to turn, our native black walnut, is already going yellow beside the San Diego Freeway and elsewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Sycamores along creeks turn to copper from October on into January. You see them in Topanga and Malibu canyons, along Mulholland Highway and the Pasadena Freeway, in Griffith and other parks. Two notable, user-friendly places for walks among coloring sycamores are Malibu Creek in the state park of that name and Big Sycamore Canyon in Point Mugu State Park. The first raindrops falling on sycamore leaves dry and crisp as wrapping paper sound like a distant cascading stream, long before water rises in the creek.

Cottonwoods turn some major watercourses into corridors of yellow. Look for them along the Santa Clara River in upper Soledad Canyon and Big Rock Creek below the San Gabriel Mountains’ north slope. Up in the Owens Valley, travelers to Mammoth Lakes note the cottonwood as the signature tree of ranch, road and creek. But the color display may be brief. When a wild Santa Ana comes through, dry leaves do not hang around.

By October the California black oak in Yosemite Valley creates spectacular amber that turns a brilliant yellow-orange when back-lit by the sun. Closer to home it performs at higher elevations in November around Big Pines in the San Gabriel Mountains. In the high San Bernardino Mountains you see it from about Angelus Oaks to Onyx Summit along California Highway 38 and Snow Valley to Running Springs along Highway 18. It also appears in the San Jacinto Mountains around Idyllwild and in San Diego back-country mountains.

Down in the canyons, our native bigleaf maple stands out not in mass of flaming New England red but as bright orange individuals. The several willows turn to vivid yellows in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains and such Simi Hills canyons as Cheeseboro and neighboring Palo Comado--due to open as a national park property in October.

Valley oak leaves turn a disappointing brown before dropping, but coast live oaks keep their glossy, dark green leaves all year. All the oaks are producing acorns by now. Their autumn abundance once attracted coast-dwelling Chumash people inland to camp in canyons and valleys of the Santa Monica Mountains while gathering a year’s supply.

There may also be wildflowers. October thunderstorms in high and low deserts may call forth brief fall blooms. Just where is unpredictable, but Joshua Tree National Monument--east of Palm Springs--is a good place to look.

Autumn is harvest time and mid-October brings us a symbol of earth’s bounty in the American tradition, the pumpkin. That colorful herald of Halloween turns up in roadside stands and fields in town and in farming districts as well as in supermarkets. One of the best-known fields is in Carpinteria, just off U.S. Highway 101. In Calabasas (the Spanish work for pumpkins), 5,000 of the orange fruits appear in that city’s Pumpkin Festival on Oct. 23 and 24.

Our two outstanding fall harvests are apples and wine grapes. As with snow, you have to seek out their microclimates.

Apples thrive in three main cold-winter mountain districts: Tehachapi, Oak Glen and Julian. All are at elevations of 4,000 feet or more, up where the air already has a fall crispness and bears a wood-smoke tang from chimneys in the morning and evening. Apple picking is under way in all three, and orchard stands and packing sheds will sell fresh fruit at least into November. In the San Diego back-country mountains, Julian has the most charm but is the farthest and most crowded at harvest time. Oak Glen, east of Yucaipa in the San Bernardino Mountains, offers apples, cider and apple-pie bakers. Tehachapi, in its own valley west of the Mojave Desert, is a happy blend of orchards and other rural diversions for a day’s outing.

While apple orchards evoke cool regions, vineyards somehow seem more California-like. Two premium wine districts are within day-trip range: Temecula Valley to the south and the larger, more rural, more picturesque Central Coast district north of Santa Barbara.

Vineyards will be busy through October with the harvest, some with machines, some with grape pickers loading their carts. Many are also noisy with butane-cannon booms meant to discourage flocks of starlings ravenous for those succulent ripe berries. Then as fields grow quiet, wineries reach peak activity. Finally, bright autumn reds and yellows fleck the grape leaves, left on vines until the first frost signals pruning time. The color show is uncertain; it used to be better before machine harvesting, which knocks down more leaves than manual picking.

Even more in the California image are fall harvests in the Coachella Valley low desert. The most exotic comes from 5,000 acres of date gardens (as groves are properly called), like those you see along the Nile but more orderly and newer by a few thousand years. Their high palm-frond canopies often shade under-stories of grapefruit trees that use the same irrigation water. The best valley grapefruit sell in Los Angeles at premium prices by ranch of origin, like estate-bottled wine. Fall also brings tangerines for the holidays, sweet corn and artichokes--a surprise in the desert. And coming into production is another exotic, the tropical mango, unusual for its late September-early November harvest. These and local specialties that do not travel to big-city markets turn up in rural stores, roadside produce stands, date shops and U-Pick orchards.

Two kinds of recreation places, cold and warm, open their seasons in fall.

Folklore and advertising both proclaim “Snow by Thanksgiving!” at ski runs in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains. Some years they need snow-making machinery to support the slogan, operable as soon as the air temperature reaches 32 degrees or lower. In the San Gabriels, snow will close the highest stretch of the Angeles Crest Highway--Islip Saddle east to Big Pines--for the season, but roads to ski areas at Mount Waterman, Kratka Ridge, Big Pines and Mount Baldy are kept open.

The snow-by-Thanksgiving incantation is also heard in the San Jacinto Mountains. On Oct. 1 the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway opens its annual snowfall-guessing contest. The first postcard to predict the correct date of measurable snow up at the 8,500-foot top wins a prize.

Down in the summer-hot but winter-mild desert, resort communities extend from Palm Springs southeast to La Quinta. As fall advances, museums and elegant restaurants reopen, hotels return to full staffing for the high season ahead and golf courses unveil newly refurbished greens. By November the annual visitor tide rises from its summer ebb, winter residents (dubbed snowbirds) return and the social whirl gets under way. Then the chief complaints you are likely to hear from frigid-region refugees will come if the climate fails to be balmy. For the four-seasons crowd, bland is now beautiful.

Where to Go

Malibu Creek and Point Mugu state parks: Information, including days when parks close because of wildfire danger: (818) 880-0350.

Calabasas Pumpkin Festival: Oct. 23 and 24 at Paramount Ranch, Cornell Road between Kanan Road and Mulholland Highway. Information: (818) 591-2177.

Carpinteria: From northbound U.S. 101 take Santa Claus Lane exit, turn right twice and double back a short distance on the frontage road to the pumpkin fields.

Julian: Fall harvest festival has weekend events through November. Julian Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 413, Julian 92036; (619) 765-1857.

Oak Glen: Oak Glen Apple Growers Assn., (909) 797-6833.

Tehachapi: For information and an apple growers map, contact the Tehachapi Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 401, Tehachapi 93561; (805) 822-4180.

Temecula Valley: Nouveau Wine and Food Tasting, Nov. 20-21, all 11 wineries, $25. For information and a winery tour map, contact Temecula Valley Vintners Assn., P.O. Box 1601, Temecula 92593-1601; (909) 699-3626.

Santa Barbara County: Harvest festival Oct. 16 at Firestone Winery meadow, Los Olivos. For information, tickets and a winery tour map, contact Santa Barbara County Vintners Assn., P.O. Box 1558, Santa Ynez 93460-1558; (805) 688-0881.

Coachella Valley: For general and accommodations information, call Palm Springs Desert Resorts at (800) 96-RESORTS and Palm Springs Tourism at (800) 34-SPRINGS during weekday office hours. For the Aerial Tramway snowfall contest, send them a postcard at 1 Tramway Road, Palm Springs 92262.