u/davemeister

The Perseid meteor showers in the news right now remind me of the time my cousin Roy and I took a vacation to the Florida Keys thirty-three years ago. While we were there on this date in 1993, Mother Nature was kind enough to show us the most spectacular fireworks display I have ever seen.

The news had been reporting that the Perseid meteor shower that night would be the heaviest in decades. We met some locals while eating dinner at a seafood restaurant in the rural area of the lower keys and asked them what would be a good location from which to view the meteor shower. They arranged to meet up with us later that night and guided us down a remote road on Big Torch Key. It dead-ended a few miles from the nearest incandescent light at a mangrove forest in the Gulf of Mexico.

When we turned off the headlights, it was so dark that we could barely see our hand in front of our face. Our newfound friends sparked up a joint but we discovered as we passed it around that the burning cherry was not the only light dancing around in the mangrove forest. There were a bunch of fireflies flitting erratically around us.

When we looked up, there were shooting stars streaking through the skies. Scarcely a minute could pass before we would see yet another meteor flying through the atmosphere. We saw probably a gross of them in the hour or so we watched.

Many of the meteors blazed a path practically from one side of the sky to the other. Some of them had an audible whistle trailing behind them. Some of them ended their journey in an explosive flash of light. We could even hear a little pop when the atmosphere vaporized some of them.

There were long, straight tracks of light through the sky above. There were lights zigzagging all around us closer to the ground. And there were the cherries flaring up in orange as we took hits off the joints. Mother Nature brought them all together in one magical night to grace us with a fireworks display like no pyrotechnic engineer could equal.

Wave after wave of storms in the El Niño winter of 1983 washed out the piers at many Orange County beaches. Here are the photos (restored using AI but unmodified) that I took of two of them in the spring that followed. El Niño carried away the middle of the Seal Beach pier, leaving an 'island' at the end, and took the end of the San Clemente pier. He also took The End Cafe on the Huntington Beach pier but I didn't get a photo of it.

On this date in 2011, Tenaya Lake was still mostly frozen over. But the Merced River reached almost eleven feet at Pohono Bridge. The waterfalls were gushing and the meadows were flooded.

Half Dome has great character but El Capitan is my #1. Which one is yours?

The Merced River meandering through Yosemite Valley from Happy Isles to the Merced River Gorge during the freshet of 2011 when the height of the river almost reached eleven feet.

During the freshet of 2011, the height of the Merced River almost reached eleven feet (at the Pohono Bridge). This is what Nevada Fall, Yosemite Falls, and Bridalveil Fall looked like on that day.

The view of Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point

This true story from my youth revolves around a concert that was fire! But unlike when most people say a “concert was fire,” I mean it literally. It's a cautionary tale about why it's not wise to toke and drive. But the danger of doing so turns out to be not what you expected.