In the category of “Gary’s An Idiot”…
So I’ve seen a LOT of sunrises. But never like the one this morning CRAZY STUFF!!!
So I was pedaling south with a lot of clouds and no real sunrise. When I got to about Belmont, I noticed this odd “glow” in the water. I literally pulled over just to examine and take some pictures. A large patch of glowing orange in the water. What??? I’ve NEVER seen this before?!!!!
With just a few hours of sleep, biking in darkness and my mind racing, I of course came up with several plausible scenarios to explain the glow in the lake. Luminescent plankton? Oil or gasoline spill? Plane crash? Flaming chemical spill? Volcanic lava? So many possibilities, my mind was racing.
So much so that I actually stopped off at Fullerton to point it out to two policemen who were hanging out enjoying the sunrise. They hadn’t noticed it, but were equally intrigued after I pointed it out. No news on their radio. No solutions.
So I pedaled further and grouped up with three fellow bikers. I pointed it out to them as well. They said they had noticed it around Montrose. I asked if they had an ideas, and one of them said it was the clouds. What??? There was no sunrise anywhere, so there could be no reflection!!! So where could the glowing the water be coming from???
As the sky lightened up, you could start to see what was really going on… a bit better…
SPOILER ALERT…
So here’s what was REALLY going on. Nowhere as cool as the scenarios I was running through my head. Turns out I’m just an idiot. But it was kind of an optical illusion. If you look really closely, the actual horizon line is blow the “orange glow in the lake.” So it is indeed orange clouds floating low above the horizon. I think the visually confusing part is that there is a perfectly straight line above the orange glow as well. So I mistook that as the horizon line… thus putting the orange glow IN THE WATER, instead of above in the clouds as normal sunrises are. I like my version better… made the morning ride oddly interesting today!!!