Great Lakes Archives • words and images

February 7, 2021

This year, the weather cooled off in February instead of January, but so far I’ve seen only a faint wisp of sea smoke once. Even though it is mostly above 0ºF, it’s cold enough outside, with frequent fits of snow.

I’ve no statistics to support my idea that June seems to be prime time for summer storms. It was on June 30, 2011, that a sudden hailstorm devastated Garfield Park Conservatory. Yesterday, this evening storm followed a few afternoon ones. No hail by me, but interesting skies.

Spring sunrise over Promontory Point

This rainbow appeared only eight minutes after I took a photo of the double rainbow. The entire sky, including color, had changed that fast.

The plan was to go to Messenger Woods Nature Preserve again, but a slew of tornado and thunderstorm watches and warnings put me off. I stayed home, which let me witness this.

I’m reminded of a few evenings on Lake Superior when the sky and water blended into an otherworldly blur.

This is another Belt of Venus, this time taken in Wisconsin on Lake Michigan, November 28, 2015. Different from this one and this other one in Chicago.

Kohler_Andrae sunset — Belt of Venus, slightly disrupted?, on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin

Full rainbow

Posted on April 11, 2020 by dlschirfMay 23, 2020

The world could use a bit of luck. Or hope.

I’ve retired my old Lake Michigan moods post and am replacing it with this slightly newer model that may be updated from time to time. These photos were taken by an assortment of iPhones, iPads, and cameras over the years, not always at a high resolution. In some cases I haven’t found the originals. They’re mostly from my living room window, with a few from my office window and even fewer taken at other places, like Michigan City, Indiana.

They illustrate the many moods of the only Great Lake that runs north-south, with Indiana and Michigan to the east and Illinois and Wisconsin to the west. The clouds range from bright and fluffy to dark and menacing with everything in between, including odd mixtures of types. There are fog monsters and rainbows. There’s lightning caught with a webcam. There’s sea smoke that rises on the coldest days (“Lake Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams,” writes the legendary Gordon Lightfoot). There are ice and snow. There are blues, purples, pinks, greens, oranges, and nearly every color of the rainbow — and I’m not even focusing on sunrise photos (that’ll be another set).

There’s calm. And sometimes there’s calm followed by terror, like the June 30, 2011, hail of hail that devastated the Garfield Conservatory and left me a gelatinous mess.