A Stormy Night
Lightning over Bishop and the Owens Valley, CA, USA
Over the weekend Claudia and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Millpond Music Festival in Bishop, over on the eastern side of the Sierra. This is the 15th consecutive year we’ve attended this festival. Hanging out with friends, listening to music underneath the high peaks of the Sierra, made for a wonderful, relaxing, fun weekend. And as a bonus, I got to photograph some interesting weather.
The land around Bishop is semi-desert, so it doesn’t get much rain. We’ve been sprinkled on a couple of times at Millpond, but had never experienced any serious rain – until Saturday.
A weak low-pressure system pulled some remnants of Hurricane Odile up from the south. Clouds and thunderstorms developed over the mountains, but missed Bishop and the Owens Valley until Saturday evening. As the second-to-last act of the day was performing, a few raindrops fell. I looked at radar images on my phone, and saw some serious-looking storm cells moving right up the valley from the south. I estimated that we had an hour or two before we got dumped on. Figuring that the last performance would be cancelled anyway, I decided to try and get some lightning photographs.
