Wapsi Square Forum

Fog fills the Grand Canyon:

I used to get this sort of thing a lot in one place where I lived as a kid. My cave was high up on the side of a glacier valley, and some mornings I'd go look out and it would appear as though the valley floor was only a few feet below and covered in snow. Or sometimes there would be a weird sandwich effect, where there was fog down at the bottom of the valley, then a layer maybe a meter or two thick of perfectly clear air where you could see all the way across and up and down the valley, then a solid mass of clouds from there on up.

There were also lots of fun light effects, such as seeing a huge dark dancing shadow of yourself with a bright glowing halo around its head.

Too bad I didn't have a camera then.

That's really beautiful! Definitely worth waiting for, and jumping at the chance to see. Some folks out there were very fortunate.

Some years ago I visited a big amateur observatory on Fremont Peak (south of San Jose) on the occasion of the unveiling of a big new telescope. A lot of people brought their own 'scopes, and there was a big "sky party". One guy whose 'scope was free gave me a tour of "deep sky", and for the first and only time in my life I saw Pluto.

Late in the evening I looked down the hill into the valley below, and saw that it was full of fog. About 20 minutes later I looked down again, and it was perfectly clear. Another half-hour and it was foggy again... and so forth, for several hours. The fog-filled "marine layer" air from the coast was sloshing up against the hills, receding back towards the coast, "sloshing" up again... waves of fog, breaking against the mountain slopes. I imagined it was ringing like a bell, in a pitch much too low for my ear to hear...

Haven't seen anything like that again, although I'd love to.