The Best Covered Bridges to See This Fall
A covered bridge is already a good photo. Set one against a hillside of turning maples, with the creek below running low and clear the way it does in October, and it becomes the kind of image that ends up on a calendar. Fall is, by a wide margin, the best time of year to go looking for these bridges — the crowds that show up for summer swimming holes have thinned out, the light turns gold in the late afternoon, and in a handful of counties, entire festivals are built around the combination of leaf-peeping and bridge-hopping. Here's where to point the car, region by region.
New England: the original color tour
New England didn't just build a lot of covered bridges — it built them in exactly the kind of terrain that puts on the best autumn show in the country, which is why this region anchors almost every "best fall foliage" list already, bridges or not.
Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge, spanning the Connecticut River between Cornish, New Hampshire and Windsor, Vermont, is the obvious headliner. At 449 feet, it's the longest wooden covered bridge in the United States, and its position on the river valley floor means it catches color from both the Vermont and New Hampshire hillsides at once. It's also still open to vehicle traffic, so you can drive across it exactly as travelers have since 1866.
Grafton County, New Hampshire, deep in the White Mountains foothills, is worth a full afternoon on its own. The Bath Covered Bridge (1832) over the Ammonoosuc River and the Blair Covered Bridge (1870) over the Pemigewasset both sit against mountain backdrops that peak in color earlier than the lowlands — often by the last week of September, ahead of the rest of New England.
In Massachusetts, the Bissell Covered Bridge in Charlemont sits directly on the Mohawk Trail, one of the oldest and most famous scenic fall drives in the country, while the Burkeville Covered Bridge in Conway crosses the South River in the Franklin County hill towns, arguably the most concentrated cluster of foliage-drive covered bridges in the state.
Vermont, unsurprisingly, has more small, easy-to-combine stops than any other state on this list — a genuine back-roads bridge tour is possible almost anywhere in the state during peak color, which typically runs late September through mid-October depending on elevation.
Mid-Atlantic: Pennsylvania's back roads
Pennsylvania has more covered bridges than any other state — over 200 across 40 counties — which means fall foliage season turns much of rural Pennsylvania into an unofficial driving tour. Adams County, just southwest of Gettysburg, pairs particularly well with a fall trip: the Sachs Covered Bridge, the county's most storied span, and the nearby Jack's Mountain Covered Bridge sit a few miles apart, both easy to combine with a Gettysburg battlefield visit as the surrounding farmland turns gold and rust in October.
Farther north, Bucks County and Lancaster County's Amish country routes are laced with small 19th-century bridges among rolling farmland — less dramatic elevation than New England, but a classic Mid-Atlantic harvest-season backdrop of cornfields and covered spans.
Appalachia: mountains instead of maples
The Blue Ridge and the Smokies run on a different color palette and a slightly later calendar than New England, typically peaking mid-to-late October, but the payoff is arguably even better given the elevation change.
Virginia's Humpback Covered Bridge, the only arched covered bridge left in the country, sits in the Alleghany Highlands near Covington — Blue Ridge Parkway territory, with color that climbs the ridgelines through October. Farther south, Tennessee's Harrisburg Covered Bridge near Sevierville and the Elizabethton Covered Bridge both sit at the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the most visited fall foliage destinations in the country; pairing either bridge with a Smokies drive is an easy add-on rather than a special trip.
The Midwest: bridges built for this exact season
No region has turned covered bridges and fall color into more of an institution than the Midwest, and two counties in particular plan their whole tourism calendar around it.
Parke County, Indiana bills itself, with some justification, as the "Covered Bridge Capital of the World" — it has more covered bridges than any other county in the country, many of them clustered along Sugar Creek and Big Raccoon Creek in a landscape of hardwood forest that turns hard in early-to-mid October. The county's Covered Bridge Festival, a ten-day event held every October since 1957, draws well over a million visitors and maps out driving routes connecting dozens of its bridges — genuinely built for exactly this kind of trip.
Ashtabula County, Ohio runs a similar operation on a smaller scale, with a scenic covered bridge driving route that includes the modern, record-setting Smolen-Gulf Covered Bridge (at 613 feet, the longest covered bridge in the country) alongside a string of historic Pratt-truss spans, all wrapped into the county's own October Covered Bridge Festival.
Timing it right
Peak color moves south and downhill through autumn, roughly: northern New England and the Great Lakes hit their best color in late September to the first week of October, Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley follow in the second and third weeks of October, and the Blue Ridge and Smokies typically peak in the third and fourth weeks of October, sometimes stretching into early November at lower elevations. A covered bridge road trip planned around that north-to-south, high-to-low progression can, in a good year, stretch the season by several weeks longer than sticking to one region alone.