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| Rainbow Over the Richmond District |
I was browsing the internet this morning with my oatmeal and coffee when the sun started breaking out. I wondered if I might have time for a walk down to the beach, so I checked the weather radar and then the Ocean Beach web cam.
The radar showed that rain was almost certain to get me, but I was surprised to see on the Ocean Beach cam that snow had fallen lower than I'd expected on Mt. Tamalpais. I bolted from the computer, grabbed my camera gear, and drove over to Grandview Park to try to photograph the snowy mountain.
Unfortunately, even in the short time it took me to climb the steps to the vista point, a phalanx of clouds moved into to obscure the snowy ridge. For just a couple of seconds near the bottom of the stairs I had been able to see the whole mountain from the ocean to East Peak adorned with a frosting of snow, but by the time I reached the top and set up the camera, huffing and puffing, the mountain heights were almost completely obscured.
I hung out for quite a while, hopeful that the mountain would reveal itself again, and shot some time lapse footage instead of just standing in the cold. No luck on the clearing. Meanwhile a dense rank of storm clouds was blowing closer and closer, and with the first few drops I packed up and took refuge in my car.
The storm passed over, by and by, and a rainbow began to form over the Marin Headlands. I grabbed my gear and started hiking back up the stairs when I stopped to photograph a ship heading out to sea, disappointed that I couldn't have caught it closer to the foot of the rainbow. The ship turned out to be a vehicle carrier called Cetus Leader that had just left its San Francisco anchorage bound for Nagoya, Japan.
It was interesting to see the rainbow so low on the horizon. A little later I thought I might see another bow as a squall moved perfectly into position, but by then the sun was so high that no rainbow could be seen (42 degrees above the anti-solar point, where the rainbow would be, was well in front of the rain squall).
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| View from the fire look-out on Mt. Tam's East Peak this morning |
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| Clouds Preparing to Obscure the Last Bit of Snow |
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| Crop of Previous Image |
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| Rain Heading for the City |
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| City View from Grandview |
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| Japanese Vehicle Carrier Cetus Leader with Rainbow |
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| Rainbow Fragments (click images to view larger) |
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