Sometimes looking back, it’s amazing how with no intention, things line up, and you get to experience something wonderfully unexpected. We had a one-night car camping trip planned for last Friday at Coyote Lake Harvey Bear Ranch County Park in order to be near the Henry Coe Hunting Hollow entrance so that we could hit the trail for Bills Hill early in the morning before it got too hot. Little did we know that the solar storm would also be peaking that day and we’d have the rare opportunity to witness one of nature’s most incredible spectacles (the other being the solar eclipse, which we were also fortunate enough to have seen last month) right here in the Bay Area.
This was our first time to Coyote Lake and at the end of April I managed to snag the last available spot. I picked up Chris from his office and it took us another 1.5 hours to arrive at the park. Incredibly, outside of Friday afternoon rush hour, the entire trip from San Francisco normally takes about as long.
Spot #24 was not shaded so we set up camp under the blazing hot sun. It had been an unusually warm week for early May which only reinforced the reason for staying down here and getting a head start on our hike tomorrow. Around 6:30 P.M., we went for a short walk around the lake and watched people fish and kayak. Dinner was soup, salad and black bean burgers. After cleaning up, we sat under our gazebo, waiting for the sky to darken and the temperature to cool down.
We went to sleep around 10 P.M. and planned to get up at 11. It felt as if I had just closed my eyes before I heard Chris rustling about and then a few minutes later, coming back into the tent urging me to get up. I put on my coat and shoes and then stepped out into the darkness. He pointed towards the top of the ridge line and I could see that the sky, punctuated by twinkling stars, was not a uniform black. There was a pinkish/purplish haze dancing right over Henry Coe State Park. The vividness of the colors, however, was only revealed once I used my phone to take a series of photos. Wow! It was, indeed, the aurora borealis and quite literally magical: what was almost imperceptible with our naked eyes was fully visible using the camera phone.
What a treat! It’s hard to believe we got to see it. The conditions had to be just right and we were lucky that we happened to be in a park on a cloudless night and sufficiently far away from a city and its bright lights. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the Northern Lights I hope I get to see them again.