Winter is coming, the mountain weather reports say.

But fall hasn’t finished yet. Which means a collision of fall and winter is on tap in the high country this weekend.

There’s even a name for that now, “snowliage,” when snowfall mixes with fall foliage, and it’s making for photos of breathtaking beauty from our photo chief Christian Murdock and his shooters Jerilee Bennett and Tim Hurst here at The Gazette. Gold leaves and the silver edge of winter commingling for a moment of time: it looks like a Tiffany’s has spilled out all over the mountainsides.

Fall Colors in Colorado

I’ve always treasured these collisions of the seasons. That’s because such intersections may be the true essence of Colorado, where you can play golf and go skiing on the same day. Colorado is a winter playground that completely converts to a summer playground. Colorado is the intersection of mountains and plains, a crossroads of wild and urban.

We’re a bit bipolar in Colorado: We want proximity to raw nature without giving up the trappings of civilization. Most of our cities line the Front Range like a row of big lawn chairs facing the mountains. I’m a Coloradan through and through in this regard. Nothing I like more than sitting safe by a roaring fire in one of those great old national park lodges watching an epic storm roll in.

For Colorado’s autumn glory, we can always count on Gazette photographers

This time of year is when Colorado’s different personalities clang together, when the whole pageant of the state’s natural gifts is on display in a calamity of color. There’s alchemy that happens in hazy October skies, a shifting of something into something else that speaks of possibility. Anything can literally happen on a single dizzying October day in Colorado: sunshine, quaking leaves, snowfall and chinooks, sometimes all at once.

I’ve experienced all four seasons in a day climbing a fourteener, something that’s probably only possible in vertical states like Colorado. Those days feel like they last a year, like they could last forever.

Some used to call the surprise warming spells during these golden days between fall and winter Indian Summer, which is frowned on now since the word Indian really has nothing to do with the Native Americans who populated this continent. But Indigenous Summer doesn’t have the same ring, so the American Meteorological Society has come to call it Second Summer, which I kinda like: The warm spells of October do feel like a kind of bonus summer in the fall.

There are other names, too.

Europeans and British still use St. Martin’s Summer, referencing St. Martin’s Day — Nov. 11 — the official start of these unusually late warm spells in Europe, though they start earlier here in Colorado, of course. Shakespeare called it All Halloween Summer. I’ve also heard it called quince summer, badger summer, even pastrami summer, though I have no idea why.

Fall colors road trip: 10 scenic drives for experiencing fall in Colorado

Remember that curmudgeon poet who said April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire? Well, by his metrics, October must be the kindest, blending nostalgia and anticipation. Those linking months between seasons, April and October, have a lot in common, really, but October is probably the gentler, wiser month, summoning up an autumnal wistfulness that April does not yet know.

These days of collision, the sinew between seasons, they are the times that also reconnect us Coloradans with the landscapes we so treasure. It’s when the tourists go home and the secret beauties and charms of the so-called mud season are there just for us homers. It’s when we locals can rush back out into the wide opens in our Jeeps and hiking boots and not find a soul again.

What was Superman’s hideaway called? The Fortress of Solitude?

That’s what I’m looking for in the in-between of winter and fall, my own fortress of solitude up there in the castellated peaks, when I can have Colorado to myself again. Nothing better than to feast on the frosted aspens in a quiet glade this uncrowded time of year, stand on the grandest of stages, and watch a rerun of one of nature’s greatest pageants: The Change of Seasons.

Being in the mountains in these interstices, it’s like being in a dream awake.

So bring on the snowliage, weather gods, the more weather the merrier. We Coloradans welcome it with wide eyes.