Whose fall colors are better, Colorado’s or New England’s?

I’ve spent many a season with both, and I gotta give the nod to Colorado.

Sure, New England has a stunning variety of colors — the scarlets and oranges of the red maples, the brilliant copper of the sassafras, the gold, heart-shaped leaves of the redbud, the purples of the kousa dogwoods and the bright-yellow feather-leaves of the Hawthorn.

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But you know, eventually, it starts to look like someone wearing too much jewelry. It’s a little over the top in its exploded crayon box of colors way. Enough already — make up your mind, you show-off trees!

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I prefer the elegant, elemental contrast of Colorado’s greens and golds. It’s purer here, a two-way conversation, like a black and white photo. And then there’s the contrast of those tremulous aspens with the stolid pines and peaks amid them. There’s a poignant fragility to the aspens as their leaves die off and the pines stand witness, ever-green.

I had the pleasure to see the grand finale of the color change last weekend on a jeep ride up Gold Camp Road to Victor. Hard for me imagine a better aspen drive so near, on the road where Teddy Roosevelt once said the scenery bankrupts the English language.

Far from the crowds of peepers, the old, tunneled road offers up vista after vista as you wind up into the hills. Cabins, horses, herds of cows, craggy peaks, sweeping meadows, crystal lakes and miles-wide valleys are all heightened by highlights of crimson and gold, like the landscape has been gift-wrapped and ribbon-tied for fall.

I last drove this road about 35 years ago, before the tunnel collapsed up on the High Road. So it’s a different drive now, starting out on Old Stage Road rather than wending its way right out of the city on the backside of Cheyenne Canon.

But it’s different in other ways 35 years on. When you’re as old as I am, the turning of the aspen is tuneforked with memories. My parents always made the aspen viewing a ritual in the station wagon, with us six kids clambering all over each other in the back two seats to get the best view. Except on roads with steep drop-offs, like those over Red Mountain Pass, for instance. Then I remember the younger girls in the family scrambling to the side of the car that hugged the rock wall, while we daredevil boys hung our heads out the windows over the cliff.

It was always a family ritual to find a perfect golden branch and break it off to bring it home with us, where we put it in a vase and enjoyed the turning for another few weeks right in the kitchen.

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After so many seasons, you realize what a deep relationship you have to this place, with memories buried all over its hills.

The bright brief gold on this trip reminds me of friends who died too young but went out in a blaze of glory. The aspen-laced mountainsides remind me of my daughter conducting trees like an orchestra in Yellowstone one autumn, or the joy of my son finding flakes of gold (planted by dad) while gold-panning in a river beneath Mount Princeton.

On the road back up Colorado 67 to Divide, funny but it was the appreciators I appreciated. There were a million cars on that road, in contrast to the three or four on my Gold Camp ribbon of solitude. But I found myself not minding, even reveling in other people’s revelry. I pulled off more times than I can count to jump out and take a picture for a trio of travelers, a happy couple, a gaggle of kids and their dog. Hey look, they love it just as much as I do, and more folks than ever now share in my sacred fall ritual.

I had to turn back as the last golds were petering out, because I almost forgot to break a branch and bring it home.

It’s already browning in the vase in my kitchen, but I’m not throwing it out for a long while. It’s my talisman to older times.

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There’s one last thing, I realize, that I like about Colorado’s fall versus New England’s. New England’s trees are all nestled into snug little valleys between all those rolling hills. I used to feel all closed in when I went to see them, and I remember feeling like I had to get out of the trees eventually to a hilltop where I could truly see.

I like how Colorado author Hal Borland put it in “High, Wide and Lonesome.”

“Those who live with a far horizon in their boyhood are never again bound to a narrow area of life,” he observed. “For one who grew up under that tremendous span of sky … a land of lesser distances lacks dimension.”

You may leave Colorado sometime, but this loyal, golden old state will never leave you.