The slow-moving storm that swept through Maine last weekend may have brought a lot of wind and rain, but Maine’s leading foliage expert said this week that it wasn’t enough to put an early end to the Pine Tree State’s leaf-peeping season.

“It did knock down some leaves, a substantial amount of leaves, but in my opinion, the leaves weren’t so weak on the trees to drop,” said Gale Ross, fall foliage spokesperson for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

The storm, which arrived Oct. 14 and took at least 24 hours to move through the state, brought winds gusting as high as 75 mph in some locations, according to the National Weather Service. 

The storm did cause widespread power outages for thousands of customers statewide, but while the service also predicted the storm might bring Maine’s foliage season to a close, Ross said that hasn’t been the case.

“In my travels around the midcoast region, there’s still a lot of pretty colors,” she said.

At Acadia National Park, the storm had little to no impact on local foliage, according to Nate Parkinson, the park’s spokesperson.

“It doesn’t seem to have affected a whole lot, to be honest,” he said. “I would have expected us to have lost a lot of leaves too, but we didn’t.”

Viewing conditions at the park have been at peak for about a week, Parkinson said, and there have been plenty of visitors coming to take in the view.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “We’re just as busy as it was in the middle of the summer.”

Ross, who has been studying Maine’s fall foliage season since the early 2000s, said northern Maine very likely lost a lot of leaves last weekend, but that region is generally past peak colors at this time of year anyway. Farther south, including the midcoast and southern Maine, are where leaf-peepers want to be, but time is running out there, too.

“Most everywhere is at peak right now,” she said. “By next week, the entire state will be past peak.”

While the summertime drought and autumn storms are always a threat, Ross said the real predictor of a good foliage season is evening weather during the season. Long, cool nights and shorter days, she said, are the key.

“It’s always about our weather going forward, the environment needed to put the trees to bed,” she said.

This year, she said, the nighttime weather has been perfect, as opposed to the warmer evenings the state experienced the past couple of years.

“I am pleasantly surprised that this season we were able to report the foliage conditions for six weeks,” she said.