The leaf-peepers are coming.

With Columbus Day weekend around the corner, travel and tourism officials are rolling out the welcome mat for more than half a million visitors.

Most of the 580,000 tourists are expected to trek up to Franconia Notch and other vantage points in the White Mountains to see the New Hampshire landscape explode in color. That number is slightly down from a year ago, according to Tai Freligh, communications manager for New Hampshire Travel and Tourism.

Wall Street jitters and people's fears about the economy are the likely reasons for the decline. Nonetheless, visitors will spend an estimated $85 million over the three days, Freligh said. Traditionally, Columbus Day is the third biggest of the four big holidays. (The others are July 4, Memorial Day and Labor Day.)

Not all that money will go to travel and entertainment.

"The Columbus Day weekend is the unofficial early start to holiday shopping," he said, and may bring more Canadians over the border than a year ago.

"They check out the leaves and then go shopping," taking advantage of the exchange rate, lower fuel prices and tax-free stores, he said.

"A lot of people are going to be coming from New England and New York," Freligh said because people farther away are not coming.

The 580,000 prediction only counts out-of-staters.

"We're definitely going to have a good showing in-state as well," he said.

Although foliage in the most northern parts of the Granite State peaked this weekend, by Columbus Day, the color in most of New Hampshire will be on fire.

There are too many places to count, really," Freligh said. "Franconia Notch is good because it's up in the White Mountains, and there are more trees, fewer buildings and people."

The Kancamagus Scenic Byway, from Conway to North Woodstock, is also likely to be jammed with leaf-peeperazzi. But anyplace in the North Country can be a destination.

"This time of year, when the foliage is spread all over the place, people can see it from a major interstate or a country road," he said.

Leaf-peepers also stop in Salem at the Welcome Center, according to Mary Burris, an attendant at the tourist and information bureau along Interstate 93. On Saturday of the Columbus Day weekend, she will deal with 1,300 travelers over an eight-hour shift. But they don't stay. Most are headed up to the North Country and stop for a map, a calendar of events or the name of an eatery, she said.

"Franconia Notch can be a congested area" over the Columbus Day weekend, said Bill Boynton, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. But there's no one specific area where traffic bogs down. Sometimes, the delays are simply due to people looking at the scenery, instead of driving.

Ultimately, the number of cars on the road will depend on the weather, he said.

"We are just starting to see one thing that's a clear pattern," he said. "This year our toll numbers are 8 to 9 percent lower than last year."

Boynton said typically, New Hampshire would see increases of cars going through the tolls at a rate of about 3 percent.

Gas prices, which have dropped recently, are not likely to change the tourism numbers because prices at the pump historically fall this time of year, according to Nick Wollner, spokesman for the Automobile Association of America Northern New England. The price for a gallon of regular has dropped 18 cents since last month, he said, to $3.46 as of Thursday.

That's still high compared to the $2.68 a gallon motorists paid a year ago, but Wollner said the trend appears to favor price declines now, barring an international incident or another storm in the Gulf of Mexico.

"The market is touchy," he said. "But presently, we're pleased they're going down the way they are now."

Wollner said this time, the oil industry recovered quickly from the hurricane, and there are only spotty shortages in parts of the Southeast. He could not predict the number of people on the road for the Columbus Day weekend because AAA estimates travel on national holidays. Columbus Day is a floating holiday nationwide, and the leaf peepers are really a New England phenomenon.