Most students are oblivious to it. They're too concerned with the imminent test, the big game or who is having the party Friday night.
But every fall, the leaves on the trees dotting the Hanover plain begin to change. Deep reds and bright yellows replace the warm greens, and the beauty is not forgotten by everyone.
From mid-September to mid-October, scores of leaf-watchers pass through Hanover on their fall foliage bus tours.
Dartmouth students hurrying across campus stare curiously at the people disembarking from the "Peter Pan" buses. These people seem to wander aimlessly around the Green studying the trees and the buildings.
Ann Cousins of Topeka, Kan. is one of the foliage-watchers.
"I'm a leaf-peeper," the elderly woman said proudly. "I've come for the leaves and the beautiful fall colors."
Cousins is a member of a 45-person tour offered by the Globus Tour Company. She is passing through Hanover on the seventh day of her 10-day trip through New England.
Foliage tours are popular with retired people, according to Peter Newton, a sales representative for Tourco, a wholesale company that assembles fall foliage tours and sells them to bus companies.
This coming weekend marks the peak of the fall foliage season, Newton said.
"Ninety-five percent of our trippees are senior citizens who are retired," Newton said. "The women outnumber the men two to one." The number of people on each trip varies between 25 and 47, he said.
Tourco offers tours ranging from four to eight nights that travel through Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts.
Hanover is one of Tourco's stops in the White Mountains.
"We go to Dartmouth on all our tours," Newton said. "People really like Dartmouth. We've included it for several years. It's always a winner."
Vesta Kerns, of Bemidji, Minn., passed through Hanover Tuesday as part of a Tourco group. She came on the trip with three of her friends. Two of the women brought their husbands along.
"I went on this trip because I wanted to compare the leaves with Northern Minnesota," Kerns said. "Our leaves are pretty, but not quite as pretty as yours."
Bob Wilson, a self-proclaimed "tree expert" from Texas, is also on the Tourco trip. He holds a bunch of auburn and yellow leaves in his hand to keep as souvenirs, and his camera hangs loosely from his shoulder.
"The panoramic splendor is overwhelming," Wilson said. "We don't get this beauty in the Midwest."
Charles Heltman is on a different kind of foliage tour. Heltman is part of a Southern Baptist Missions Awareness Tour.
Heltman, clad in his 1992 Alabama Crimson Tide hat, is an avid member of the Southern Baptist church in Louisiana. He said he took this trip to "see the Baptist work and the beautiful leaves in New England."
The Southern Baptist members have a different perspective on the leaves than the Tourco group.
"As we see the leaves, we see God's handiwork in practice," said George Blackburn of Mobile, Ala.
Evelyn Cook, of Billingsley, Ala., quickly agreed.
"I keep thinking to myself that man couldn't do this," she said. "It has been a religious renewal experience."
Southern Baptist tours are combination vacation and mission trips to see what Southern Baptists are doing in New England, said Mary Beth Kaffee of VPS tours, the company that coordinates the tours for Southern Baptist.
"It's a combination fall-foliage, leaf-peeper tour," Kaffee said. "Its goal is to make people aware of the work that New England Southern Baptists are doing."
The seven-day trip stops in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, Kaffee said.
The leaf-peepers on this trip come from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia, but other trips have had members from all over the South, Kaffee said.
The Southern Baptists stay in motels at night and eat at local restaurants during the day. While at Dartmouth, they ate at Thayer Dining Hall.
"The food was pretty good and there was lots of variety," Heltman said.
All the leaf-peepers said that the trips were not entirely relaxing due to the fact that they were constantly on the move and changing hotels.
"We've been pretty busy," said Berdine Elles of Topeka, Kan. "We leave the hotel at eight o'clock in the morning."
"We're not going on this trip to relax, but to enjoy the New England states," she added.
The leaf-peepers also pump a lot of business into the Hanover economy.
Claire McNamara, controller for the Hanover Inn, said she estimates that 60 percent of the rooms in the hotel during the one-month season are filled by leaf-peepers. In addition, many of the tours stop at the hotel restaurants for lunch.
Clerks at Traditionally Trendy, a gift shop in downtown Hanover, said the store's business increases by 25 to 30 percent during leaf-peeper season.
