Saddleback Snow – Spectrum Wheel Two Days Later.
I’ve added a few more pictures to my Snowline photoset showing the unusual amount of snow in the local Santa Ana Mountains.
There’s a few more from Thursday, plus a couple of pictures I grabbed Friday morning, like the one shown above.
Update: Here’s one more, from a batch of photos I took at lunch today. More at Flickr…
Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos. Check this Flickr set for more.
Last January when I caught a view of the entire range of the San Gabriel Mountains absolutely covered in snow, I figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime sight. Sure, they get snow every year, but they usually don’t get that much snow.
Amazingly, I got to see something similar again today. In a way, even better, because this time the sky was clear, providing better light and an unimpeded view.
After yesterday’s rain and a prediction of more showers today, I was surprised to see empty blue sky this morning. While driving over a bridge I looked out the window and saw the mountains just coated with snow. As soon as I dropped Katie off at her office, I made a beeline for that spot near The District in Tustin that (for now) offers an unimpeded view of the mountains that dominate the skyline (on clear days) of Los Angeles County.
By then a few clouds had begun to swirl around in the distance.
I couldn’t tell at the time whether Saddleback had any snow or not, since it was still backlit (this was around 8:20 or so in the morning), so I didn’t take any pictures of it.
Here’s a panorama of the mountain range. Click on the image below to see the full thing.
It’s an amazingly clear day morning today. So clear that I suspect I saw part of the outline of Catalina Island off in the distance, between trees and buildings, on the drive to work. So clear that I decided to drive up to the park at Quail Hill in Irvine where I once spotted what I think thought was Downtown Los Angeles at a distance of ~40 miles (same as the “contrast” shot in last year’s Spring Haze post). And this time, I had a better camera.
First, here’s the view from the camera, at 3x optical zoom, to give you some context. This is looking northwest from the park. (It occurs to me I could probably have checked the direction with my phone’s GPS info.)
Everything’s flattened out near the horizon. Near the right you can see the MCAS Tustin blimp hangars, with Santa Ana beyond them. The area I’m looking at is too small to see at web size, on the left side right near where the hill cuts in front of the horizon.
Here it is zoomed in and enhanced.
I gave it a shot with the digital zoom out to 12x, but it was way too fuzzy. It worked out better just to crop the file and look at its native resolution. Someday I’ll save up and get a nifty digital SLR that will save raw images instead of JPEGs, and let me swap out lenses for serious telephoto work, but for now, this is what I’ve got.
Actually, looking at the picture, I’m no longer convinced that it’s actually downtown Los Angeles. What I can see doesn’t look clustered enough, and the buildings look shorter than I’d expect. But I can’t think what else has a bunch of buildings tall enough to see at that distance and in that direction.
It could be that only the tops of the building are visible, in which case that black rectangle bordered in white, roughly in line with the top of the light pole, could be the top section of the Aon Center, the second-tallest building in the city and the one that’s mostly black with white corners and white around the top. But in that case the US Bank Tower (the tall round one) must be completely faded into the haze.
Or it could be Century City, which is a few miles to the west of Downtown LA, and has a couple of similar buildings (black with white outlines). If that’s the case, though, downtown should be somewhere to the right and taller, and I just don’t see it. And Century City would be closer to 45 miles, rather than 40. Maybe the smog’s just thicker around downtown? Edit: This does seem more likely (see comments).
Anyway, I took some more pictures to make a panorama, which I’ll stitch together at home when I have a chance and see if it’s worth posting.
Actress Gigi Edgley, probably best known to American audiences as Chiana on Farscape, has another talent: fire twirling. She’s been performing at the weekly Huntington Beach street fair with (I think) her boyfriend, and plugged the show at the latest Farscape convention in Burbank last month. My parents, also Scapers, set up a trip with their fan meetup group and invited the two of us along.
Last night we carpooled down to Huntington Beach, arriving around 7:00. The fair runs Tuesday evenings from 5-9pm, and they block off several blocks of Main street near the pier for vendors, a farmer’s market, and performers. We didn’t see anyone else from the group where we were supposed to meet, but we did see someone carrying flaming torches (and someone else carrying what appeared to be a giant unicycle) on the opposite corner of the intersection.
Gigi started with a “warm-up” twirling a long pole with flames at either end, then Jamie came in juggling flaming torches. There was a tongue-in-cheek magic trick in which she made him “disappear.” Somewhere along the line he did some tricks on a normal-sized unicycle (including jumping over a kid’s legs with it) — while juggling. Then Gigi started swinging around chains with torches on the ends. The whole show concluded with Jamie juggling atop a twelve-foot-high unicycle.
After the show, Gigi recognized my dad’s Farscape hat, and came over to talk for a bit. (My parents have been to a lot of Farscape conventions, and my mom tends to go for the autograph signings and meet-the-actors events.) At this point we did run into two other people from the meetup group.
Afterward we (me & Katie, my parents, and the others from the fan group) went to dinner at Fred’s, which was…slow. We were in line by 8:00 at the latest, and didn’t get out until almost 10:30.
