FALL FOUND : The Tree-Shaded Core of This University Town Is an Advertisement for Autumn, and Cheap Air Fares Suggested a 48-Hour Foliage Fix

For as long as I have lived in Los Angeles, fall has been a particularly melancholy season. It’s not so much the diminishing daylight, the retreat of migrating birds or any other romantic notions. It’s the idea that I’m missing the best part of my favorite time of year.

When fall arrives but fall colors do not, I always have the desire to hunt up some appropriately brilliant foliage. What I never have is the time or the money to skip out to Vermont, or even Colorado.

Chico provided the answer. As a student at the city’s California State University campus in the 1970s, I remembered the area around this charming little college town bursting with fall colors as its very hot summers yielded to brisk winters. In particular, I recall motoring up into the nearby Sierra Nevada foothills to see entire mountainsides cloaked in reds and yellows and orange.

At the same time, Chico offers a lively downtown shopping district that can match the crafts and restaurant quotients of several better-known destinations such as Mendocino, without matching their self-conscious cuteness.

Since my wife, Alina, and I could spare only Halloween weekend to indulge my foliagephilia, the trick was to find a comfortable way to make the trip up, around and back in only 48 hours. Chico is only about 75 miles north of Sacramento, but 475 miles north of our home in Long Beach--too long to drive. Instead, we took advantage of Southwest Airlines’ 2-for-1 “Friends Fly Free” program to jet from Burbank to Sacramento; from there, we enjoyed cheap weekend rates--$24 a day--to rent a car to complete the trip.

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Being relatively new to the tourist trade, Chico still lacks many overnight accommodations outside the local Holiday Inn and a few motels. The Visitors Bureau could cite only four bed and breakfast establishments, and one of them was in Magalia, a half-hour’s drive up into the foothills. After calling the other three to see what they offered, we settled on Johnson’s Country Inn, the newest and apparently most luxurious offering, and mailed off a $40 deposit to hold one of its $90-a-night rooms.

Situated in an almond orchard southwest of downtown, the two-story inn is a little difficult to find, and one does not drive through the most scenic part of town to get there. But that was quickly forgotten once we settled into our accommodations, the Icart Room, named after the illustrator Louis Icart, whose work hangs on the walls. There are four rooms at the inn, each with its own bath and view of the surrounding orchards.

Breakfasts were unconventional--and uneven. The locally produced ham and sausage we had each morning were splendid, but the slightly dry noodle kugel served on Saturday and slightly soggy chili-corn souffle on Sunday might put off someone expecting more conventional fare of eggs or flapjacks.

Breakfast was served at 9 a.m.--and only then. When Alina and I, both champion sleepers, balked at what for us was a relatively early weekend breakfast, proprietors Joan and David Johnson offered to bring a tray of coffee and juice to our room at 8:30, as a sort of kindly wake-up call.

The object of this weekend, however, was foliage, not food. And Chico did not disappoint. Despite a late fall (which docents at the Chico Creek Nature Center said would delay the best colors until mid-November), the city’s woodsy streets were just beginning to show their colorful promise when we began our walk Saturday morning on Chestnut Street, just south of the university campus. Numerous pistachio trees began the parade, blazing spectacularly in hues of red and orange, and the region’s trademark oak and liquidambar trees were just starting to show yellow.

The effect was particularly pleasing along the southern end of The Esplanade, the fine, wide boulevard that extends north out of downtown and is flanked by towering specimens of many species. I snapped half a roll of film of the trees and stately old homes at this end of the street, where it splits into Main Street and Broadway, the twin spines of the downtown shopping district.

Strolling downtown, past Nantucket (a shop filled with Amish quilts and Shaker furniture) and the factory store of Caribou Mountaineering (a Chico manufacturer of backpacks and sleeping bags), we ducked into Jasco’s California Cafe for lunch.

Located on the second floor of the 104-year-old Phoenix Building, a collection of restaurants and bars in an exposed-brick building that was once home to the Chico Meat Co., Jasco’s is one of a cluster of inexpensive but upscale eateries that have sprung up downtown to serve students and tourists. We picked up a couple of the daily specials, two slices of tasty thin-crust pizza and a small Caesar salad.

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After lunch, Alina and I resumed the hunt for a red (and yellow and orange) October along the numbered side streets that cross downtown. Since most of the oak, chestnut and other varieties in the central city are fully mature, trees long ago arched over most of these side streets, providing canopies of color.

Unfortunately, we arrived too early in the season to enjoy much color in Bidwell Park, a 2,400-acre legacy of the town’s founding family and the third-largest city park in the country. When in full color, the park--so densely wooded that it convincingly played the role of Sherwood Forest in the 1938 Errol Flynn film “The Adventures of Robin Hood”--is unforgettable.

The park borders the banks of Big Chico Creek as it flows out of the Sierra foothills and into the town, and was donated to the city by Annie E.K. Bidwell after the death of her husband, John, in 1900. The Bidwells’ 125-year-old mansion, which once hosted presidents and governors and is now itself a state park, still stands at the northern end of downtown, adjacent to the leafy, brick-and-ivy Chico State campus. Designed by Henry Cleveland of San Francisco, who also designed that city’s elegant Palace Hotel, the 26-room, $56,000 Bidwell Mansion is the largest but not the finest example of the delightful Italianate Victorian architecture that dots the city.

That honor belongs to the Stansbury House five blocks away, at 5th and Salem streets. Once the home of a prominent local physician, Oscar Stansbury, and his wife, Libby, the lavishly decorated 10-room home is smaller, newer and cost less than the Bidwell Mansion, but is more exuberantly ornamented on the outside and more lavishly decorated on the inside.

We visited both homes--there is a $2 fee at the state-owned Bidwell mansion and a $1 fee at the city-owned Stansbury House--on Sunday morning.

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After introducing my wife to these staples of downtown architecture, we turned our attentions to shopping--starting next to the Stansbury House, at Grace Jr., which boasts of an impressive collection of Christmas decorations, and moving on to Made in Chico, a shop on West 3rd Street where one can find locally produced goods, from birdhouses to bolo ties, kiwi fruit preserves to freshly roasted almonds.

(Sadly, Made in Chico does not stock the excellent pale ale produced by the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. However, this oversight provides an excellent excuse to tour the brewery on East 20th Street and taste its porters, stouts and ales in the adjoining mahogany paneled taproom.)

Unfortunately for us, the Sierra Nevada taproom was closed on Sunday, so we had lunch at the next-best beer hall, Madison Bear Garden. “The Bear,” as it has been known locally since it opened in 1977, serves its thrifty fare amid a riot of, well, stuff--from a harness racing sulky (minus horse) to a large plaster pig--suspended from the roof or nailed to the walls. There is a patio out back for those of us who like a little quiet and a lot of sun.

The shopping tour ended at the Orient and Flume Art Glass showroom on Park Avenue, in the decidedly unattractive industrial section of Chico south of downtown. Hidden away behind some railroad tracks at 2161 Park Ave., the small Orient and Flume glassworks produces beautiful art-glass vases, paperweights and figures, examples of which have been added to the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian. We resisted the $310 vase that won our hearts, but we did buy a whimsical glass apple and noted the date of the studio’s traditional post-Thanksgiving sale, which begins Dec. 2.

We celebrated the purchase with dinner at my favorite Chico restaurant, Kramore Inn, just up Park Avenue from Orient and Flume. Like everything else that weekend, Kramore’s dinner crepes were as good as I recalled.

Budget for Two

Air fare, Burbank to Sacramento: $144

Rental car, and gasoline: 61

Two nights, Johnson’s Country Inn: 190

Dinner, Burbank Airport: 14

Lunch, Jasco’s California Cafe: 14

Dinner, Kramore Inn: 25

Lunch, Madison Bear Garden: 10

Valet parking, Burbank Airport: 30

FINAL TAB: $488

Chico Visitors Bureau, telephone (916) 891-5556; Johnson’s Country Inn, tel. (916) 345-7829.