Rolling on the Tennessee River toward fall leaves

Special sailings

Two three-hour cruises for those who want to experience the entire 26-mile length of "Tennessee's Grand Canyon" will be offered Nov. 2. Also, special Civil War-themed cruises are planned Oct. 27 and Nov. 23. www.tnaqua.org/Events.aspx.

Tennessee Aquarium Gold Pass

Includes guided Plaza and Aquarium tours and two-hour river cruise. Available Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday through Oct. 30. Tours begin at 10:15 a.m. and last until 1:15 p.m.; passengers board the cruise at 2:45 p.m. $58.95. www.tnaqua.org/GoldPass.

5 MORE LEAF-PEEPING IDEAS

Georgia State Parks' Leaf Watch site: www.gastateparks.org/leafwatch

Atlanta Beltline: www.beltline.org

Palisades Unit of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area (entrances in Cobb and Fulton counties): www.nps.gov/chat

Big Creek Greenway (Alpharetta, Roswell and Forsyth County): www.bigcreekgreenway.com

Blue Ridge Parkway (North Carolina and Virginia): www.blueridgeparkway.org

Ahhhh.

I was having that Zen moment that uniquely happens in autumn when you glimpse your first eyeful of changing leaf color. This was even though, as I peered out the tall windows of the River Gorge Explorer plying the Tennessee River, I quickly realized it was a few weeks early for the wide-screen Technicolor display for which I pined.

For this annual fall foliage fix, I didn’t travel far — just two hours north of I-285, that traffic-snarled expressway that tenses my neck five days a week.

That congested commute had something to do with wanting to cook up an alternative to leaf-peeping through the car windshield. What if I could get a different view and leave the driving to someone else?

That’s how I found myself climbing aboard the River Gorge Explorer, a slick, high-speed, smooth-riding catamaran-on-steroids that is offering two-hour “Awesome Autumn” fall-color cruises through the middle of November.

I boarded the gleaming white vessel at the Chattanooga Pier, a stone’s throw from the Tennessee Aquarium, the attraction that began transforming the city into a favorite getaway of Atlantans 21 years ago. The aquarium has been offering naturalist-guided cruises on the 70-passenger Explorer since 2008, but a lot of tourists are still discovering this pleasing diversion.

Leaf season is prime-time, causing the Explorer to offer as many as three excursions a day. But the 65-foot-long boat scoots out of downtown offering rides year-round, past the slow-going barges of Tennessee River industry, heading toward the tall-walled, tree-lined gorge.

The ride is nearly 8 miles downriver to the gorge, and the Explorer alternately uses its quad water jets to speed up to 50 miles an hour, then stops on a dime to avoid shooting a wake in the direction of swimmers, kayakers and others sharing the popular river.

Upstairs in the boathouse, the captain and co-captain steer toward increasingly pristine scenery — city industry giving way to houses with killer views of the river and then, finally, the climbing canyon walls dense with woods.

Meanwhile in the spacious cabin where tourists watch the scenery slide by, the naturalist details Chattanooga history, the Tennessee River’s natural history, Civil War battles, plants and wildlife and a good bit about the 875-horsepower Explorer itself. Overhead monitors show illustrations, photographs and maps that illustrate the talk.

Out the windows there are frequent big bird sightings — currently including soaring great blue herons and hawks and, soon, wintering sandhill cranes.

It takes the better part of an hour to reach the gorge, but the ride is so smooth and the informative talk so free flowing that I didn’t even realize I’d arrived at the main attraction until the naturalist announced that passengers were free to wander outside and climb stairs to the roomy topside observation deck.

Up there, with an unobstructed 360-degree view, there is plenty to see and learn about, as the headset-equipped naturalist continues to narrate and answer questions.

The Tennessee River Gorge winds along 26 miles of the waterway, carving its way through 27,000 acres of land in the Cumberland Mountains. The Explorer shows passengers 5 miles of it before turning back toward Chattanooga.

“Tennessee’s Grand Canyon,” as some like to call the gorge, though that struck me as a bit of a reach, is the fourth-largest river canyon east of the Mississippi. The river/reservoir is around 634 feet above sea level, with the enveloping Cumberland Plateau rising to near 1,800 feet.

“The Tennessee River Gorge is a biological ‘hotspot’ zone inside of one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, Appalachia,” aquarium chief naturalist John Dever explained later, “and that biodiversity does include trees.”

The scenic terrain of the gorge creates a unique set of land forms and micro-climates. These habitats support more than a thousand varieties of plants, ferns, trees, grasses and flowers.

Enhancing its leaf-peeping appeal, the gorge offers an up-close look at how elevation and geography can affect the plant life that explodes into color in the fall, Dever said. Those variables include sunlight exposure (look for water oaks and beeches on the shady north-facing slope, yellow pine across the river on the sunnier side), moisture levels, soil density, prevailing weather patterns and elevation. In fall, that last variable is made clear when colors pop earlier atop the gorge, where it’s 6 to 8 degrees cooler than along the river banks.

Though on my recent visit a dry early fall meant that the canyon was more green still than red, orange or gold, another passenger, Tom Burke of Roswell, said he wasn’t disappointed.

Burke, a freelancer for a Chattanooga film production company for more than 20 years, was mainly curious about the gorge’s appearance in contrast to the more familiar view of barges poking along the river though the city.

“That’s no fun to look at and I’ve seen it a thousand times,” said Burke, who was joined on the Explorer by his three teenage children. “I’ve always wondered what the river looked like in the gorge, and I was pleasantly surprised. The Explorer allows you to do that because of the speed.”

His only reservation: He just wanted to get farther away from civilization, to better enjoy the early color show provided by sweetgums, tulip poplars and dogwoods.

But Delaney, his 13-year-old daughter, seemed good with everything in her viewfinder. She was snapping photographs like she was shooting uncharted terrain for National Geographic.

Jason Liu, a University of Memphis associate business professor accompanied by Maple Yan, also was working his camera.

“It’s very beautiful,” he said of the gorge.

As for the matter of being a bit ahead of the peak fall display, he mentioned a solution that I liked a lot.

“We might just have to come back in a couple of weeks.”