On the way down to the IDETC09 conference in San Diego, we passed the massive Station Fire. The smoke cloud looked like a thunderhead. We could even see some ribbons of flames course up the mountainsides from the freeway a good ten miles away.
Earlier this summer I had been hiking up around Mount Wilson and had visited the Mount Wilson Observatory. Also up the Big Tajunga Canyon I had visited the construction site where Jesi spent most of her time. While the observatory was saved, Jesi’s dam construction site got pretty burnt out. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was threatened for a while but it managed to avoid disaster.
Here are a few pictures of the cloud from the freeway.
Those are called pyrocumulus clouds! They can have lightning inside. Awesome.
Didn’t see any lightning 🙁 Wish I had though! Coming back from Vegas a week later there were still huge plumes of smoke coming up and drifting across the desert.