SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA

August 19, 2020

Dear Familia -

It was so hot over the weekend that lightning storms formed over the bay and rolled north over town and set wildfires. Really unbelievable photos.

It was 100+ over the weekend and no one has air conditioning, so despite the pandemic the beaches looked like this; easily 5x the biggest crowd I've ever seen, and mostly folks driving in from the Valley.

PG&E shut our power off twice on Friday as part of their rolling you-don’t-get-power-sorry policy.

This is Mitchell's Cove, right where your vacation house was. See the lighting in the far left?

Same spot, zoomed in: 

Near the Boardwalk like some Ghostbusters shizz:

Near the lighthouse (by the Harbor and that ocean front restaurant Crow's Nest):

A little south of us in Rio Del Mar, there was a bioluminescent plankton event ... as well as the lighting ... so a super strange image with bright blue water: 

There was a direct stream of lightning storms, blowing north, from about 2:30am-8am?

This is a map of how many lightning strikes happened in the bay:

Unfortunately this caused a ton of fires. 

Here's the mountains burning over Hwy 1 just north of SC: 

You can see the smoke pouring down South to Santa Cruz from Davenport Beach … from SPACE:

You can see Monterey & Carmel burning in the distance ... across the bay from the beach... all that red haze is fire:

The upper Santa Cruz mountains are on fire. The red area is the current footprint of the fire 8/19, 1pm. All of the state parks are really one big contiguous forest, so the fire is jussst north of the Henry Cowell State park in Felton where we visited the redwoods.  

Woke up to the patios covered in ash. Every overnight spiderweb: catching ash. It’s been raining ash steadily all morning.

Thankfully we already have our filtration masks handy. Ash still falling from the sky.

The light here is orange and the ocean is reflecting shades of red and orange where the sun hits. Creepy! Everything smells like hot burnt trash - yes even inside.

Here's what Natural Bridges park looked like this morning: 

2020 is great!

LF

p.s. hey all … this one started as an email to my folks and then well due to image issues I went ahead and put it up as a blog post. I’m planning on updating the image credits … let me know if i missed yours! I am sorry this is taking longer than I’d like!