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It was a totally peaceful overnight, there at the electric co-op.
Nobody seemed to care about random vehicles parked in its lot, even with
out-of-state plates.
Sometime around 6 in the morning a couple of cars pulled in to the pair of
chargers, goofed around for about twenty minutes, and then left again.
I couldn't determine who they were or what they thought they were doing, but
assumed it was some early arrivals for the eclipse that had also found
this site in Plugshare.
I didn't worry about it, and caught a little more more shuteye after they left.
It was fairly cold by morning, but I'd been warm and cozy in my winter sleeping rig with thick interlaced coverings and electric heat. |
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| Schematic of winter sleeper berth setup |
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[Pic is from a quick-n-dirty diagram I drew up for an EV show a few weeks
*after* this trip; I decided to just leave the rig in place until then and
show it off as a way to demonstrate conceptual "electric RVing".]
I got myself together and headed down the hill back into Newport, and on a lark decided to take one more look at the chargers by the bank. They were *still* occupied, and observing the heavy frost on both car roofs told me that the owners had simply hooked up and walked away for the night. |
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| These idiots left their cars hogging the chargers all night |
| Inconsiderate dumbfucks. Today of *all days* was when other people coming through could have really used these, even for an hour or two of top-up. I continued on, and stopped at the Irving store on the west end of town for coffee and a breakfast sandwich -- one of my little roadtrip indulgences, even if I have food with me, because they're cheap, hot and just so tasty. While there I posted a mini-rant about the two selfish owners who were hogging the bank-lot chargers, in some vague hope of shaming them for the sake of people who didn't understand how to find alternatives. I mean, it wasn't like it was hard -- I had been outside of town where the cyan arrow points below, and up until that morning there wasn't any crowding up there. |
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| Posted a mini-rant on Plugshare about those two numbnuts |
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Viewing this in post the next day, it turned out that the Plugshare people
had actually *censored out* some of the text of my post, but left the rest
of it in place.
Sorry, if you're using a public charger or even just out driving in the
first place, your visible vehicle details *are* public information.
Over the course of all this, a tech friend who had been waffling about coming up called me, and declared "I'm doing it!" He decided to head up on a day trip after all, and was already on the road and about an hour out from Newport. We had previously talked about this and I had showed him my ridgeline spot on the maps, and he found the idea intriguing. He said that traffic was slightly heavy but all flowing at normal speeds, so he didn't have any worries about being able to make it up. |
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| Monday early morning traffic northbound: not too bad yet |
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Google-traffic seemed to concur at the time, showing nothing notable other
than a bit of a squeeze through Franconia Notch where it goes down to one
lane each way, but he was on 91 and clear of that.
Congestion at Franconia could have been from people heading up early to
the trailheads around there with the expectation of hiking up some 4K peak
for the day, who knows.
Anyone's impetus to get up on some high place for this was understandable,
even without my own aspirations about video-capture,
as it's just something humans commonly like to do.
We seem to have this urge to climb up on tall things, as in the famous words
of George Mallory about Everest, "because it's there", and that
plays out every day in the White Mountains.
Since my buddy knew where the pass was and had seen my prior research on it, I opted not to wait for him in town and started heading up there myself. I wanted to get there on the early side, to see if anyone else had the same idea. Somewhat to my surprise, there were already eight or nine other cars parked along the snowbank, and a big box truck pulled into the outer part of the lot just off the road and taking up quite a bit of space across it. The truck had privacy curtains pulled across the cab windows, so hopefully that was just a driver overnighting in a convenient spot before moving on. Oops. So much for my "secret spot". I wiggled past the truck and squeezed into one remaining space, and realized that my friend would have to basically parallel-park out near one edge of the lot as there didn't seem to be any more space to pull straight in. Oddly, there weren't too many people around. I walked up to the power line and down toward the bare rock, and found a camp chair sitting on it. Some guy had come up the previous evening and was actually bivouacing in the woods just a little way off the cut, and was already awake with a fire going, so one of the cars was his. We chatted a bit, and he said he'd seen some other people camping a little way up the Long Trail too. Clearly I wasn't the only one intending to come up here and hang out for the day waiting for eclipse time.
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| Up to Jay Pass again ... and what's that to the west? |
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My buddy showed up fairly soon thereafter, we got him parked, and we walked
back up to the power line so he could see the westward view in person.
I also took note of the little mound of gravel with no snow on it -- that's
not a rock, it's a pile of some of the aggregate they probably use for the
road surface itself.
That could make a good place to seat a camera tripod and dig it in a bit
for stability, as it was actually kind of windy up here.
But what was all that white stuff in the sky to the west, gradually growing in size? Perhaps our hitherto cloudless weather was about to take a negative turn. |
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| Satellite view of advancing thin cloud cover (click image for the animated GIF, 9.5 Mb) |
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I had checked the satellite
cloud cover image
that morning, and actually knew what was coming.
It was still quite a ways off over NY state at this point, and we were all
hoping that it was moving slowly enough to not interfere with sky viewing
about six hours hence.
In doing this trip to begin with, I resolved to accept whatever the weather threw at us. Even under overcast, it would still be fun to see everything go dark and recover, and the approaching band of cloud was actually rather high and thin and might not interfere that much with viewing either way. Cloudcover conditions across the country had actually really turned the tables on the norm this weekend -- New England was having beautiful clear weather, while much of Texas was getting clouded out -- much to the dismay of people who had traveled there hoping it would be of the drier areas. |
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| A few more people showing up... |
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To the east it was still perfectly cloudless, and as a handful of us stood
around on the rock mound down-slope it was clear that more people had come
up to this area.
It turned out that the other overnighters a short way up the Long Trail
were a group of Orthodox Jewish guys who have a hiking club, who had set up
an elaborate campsite with a couple of big tents and a fire pit.
They in particular seemed fascinated with my barefooting in the snow, asking
me all kinds of questions about it while happily bringing me up to their camp
to show it off.
They were also responsible for at least four of the cars already parked at
the trailhead when I got there.
More people began to arrive, and went to set themselves up in various spots along the road cut or even just in the parking lot. |
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| Folks setting up camp near the road cut |
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It became clear that this might be an attractive spot in general, not just
for the high-ground reasons driving my selection, so parking was going to
become bit of a clusterfuck.
The box truck driver had woken up and was hanging out with us chatting, but
actually had a delivery to make and left around mid-morning, opening up much
more space.
It would be perfectly fine if people blocked each other in if they were going
to stay there the rest of the day.
So as more cars showed up and wanted to pull in, I went into full-on
Baitcon grade
parking management mode, talking to people as they tried to pull in and
guiding them to optimal positons for maximum dense packing.
It's funny how so many people have no idea of their vehicles' external
dimensions when they're sitting in them, and have even less clue how to use
their side mirrors for precise backing-in close to other objects.
On the whole, people seemed to appreciate the parking assistance, since it
likely felt to them like those already here were actively accepting their
presence and trying to help.
Whole families started to show up, and after getting them parked efficiently I made sure to send them up the fire road to look out along the power line cut and see the real benefit of this location. |
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| Sending more people up the road to look at the westward view |
| For most folks it wouldn't really matter where they observed from, as the sun would still be fairly high by eclipse-time, so many were content to simply hang out in the parking area. For more general merriment I set up my indirect viewing-rig there, which is one half of binoculars on a tripod with a quick-n-dirty mask to make the projection on the ground easier to see. |
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| Binocular rig for magnified passive solar viewing |
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Once this rig was focused correctly, it yielded a nice sharp image of the
sun's disk.
People found this really interesting, as they hadn't thought of anything
fancier than a pinhole box or just direct viewing with eclipse glasses.
As the eclipse approached, quite a few people were gathered around this
setup since it allowed multiple folks to view an effectively larger image
than direct viewing.
The bank of cirrus cloud kept advancing over the course of the day, with a few wisps now showing up across where the sun was. This was going to be a very close race. As eclipse-time approached, a fairly steady stream of cars began showing up coming over the pass, people trying to flee eastward out from under the cloud front. Evidently it was more of a threat around Burlington than here, so folks were trying to find just about anywhere with nominally clearer skies. |
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| Cars heading northeast over the pass, fleeing the cloud layer |
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It was funny to watch people reach the top of the pass, slow down and look
at the thick pack of cars we now had in the lot, and most of them went "bah"
and kept going past us.
A few insisted on pulling in, probably noticing that it was already a
mass of triple- and quad-deep parked cars and figured one more wouldn't
hurt.
I tried to keep up with the space management, and a couple of other folks
pitched in to help with that too.
For those who stopped to actually chat with us and discuss whether they
should try to stay here or not, I suggested the Derby Walmart as an alternate
place with a good view and probably more capacity.
In retrospect
I learned
that a lot of people *did* gather there, as well as along the lakefront
in Newport, etc etc.
At about 2:15 PM, I noticed the first tiny nip out of the solar disk. I yelled out across the lot, "First contact!!", and things were about to get more interesting. Many of us had also noticed a fairly clear sunspot in the image -- some could also see it through their own glasses and filters, so it wasn't crud on my optics. (click the image to expand it) |
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| First Contact at the edge! And a visible sunspot |
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The binocular rig required a bit of babysitting, as I had to keep adjusting
the tripod a little to track the image and keep it within the shadow-mask.
We ultimately crammed a *lot* of cars into that little parking area. Eventually the "management" wasn't enough, and people were just going down the road a ways and squeezing off to the more-plowed side. I figured as long as they were clear of the actual lane line, they were good, and hopefully other people going over the pass would slow down and be careful. Folks were now wandering back and forth with viewing equipment, taking short jaunts up the trail in both directions, and milling around in general. A couple of trucks whose drivers clearly didn't give a fuck about eclipses barreled through here way too fast, because I don't know, their transit timeline is more important than other peoples' safety. Idiots. |
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| Looking southwest | Looking northeast |
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What's amusing about this is how people seemed generally drawn to group
gatherings and population centers, especially to places where someone else
had declared or even implied "you can park here to observe the
eclipse", in some kind of primitive follow-the-leader herd mentality.
Had we collectively done that, just by being here en masse?
Some people were even *paying money* in the towns to be in some notionally
"official" location, which is simply crazy stuff to me, but there are those
humans who simply cannot seem to function without constant guidance whether
it's for good or for bad.
I get the same impression when leading hikes; most participants are simply
content to follow along and aren't interested in keeping track of where they
are or learning more about their parks.
This is evidently why it's so hard to recruit more people in my hiking circles
to plan and lead some outings.
Or in general, to get people to actually think for themselves.
If the time of year had been different and local fields dry and driveable, it wouldn't have surprised me to see landowners fencing off areas and putting up signs saying "eclipse parking $20" or some such, and simply trying to cash in on the opportunity. I saw some of that in 2017. In a way it was good that this took place in mud season, and there were still plenty of places for people to go and gather and observe for free anyway. It was just odd that this relatively obscure mountain pass became one of them. |
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| More advanced shadow, and the "colander trick" for multi-pinhole |
| In addition to the binocular viewer, my buddy could demonstrate the "colander trick", aka a multi-pinhole viewer showing many little crescents. The same effect occurs in the dapple under tree leaves, but at this time of year and in an open area we weren't about to see that. |
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| About halfway to totality; shadow about to eat the sunspot |
| The binocular rig was amusing, but at some point I took it apart, because it was time to move everything up to the cut and put the camera on the big tripod instead, to set up for capturing the westward totality-onset video. The pointy legs of the tripod sank beautifully into the gravel mound, giving me nice a solid base that wasn't about to move in wind gusts. |
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| Mine were certainly not the only tracks up here any more |
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Where it had only been my tracks up here 24 hours before, now everything had
gotten trampled down enough that between that and the fifty-plus warmth of
the day, we now had our own little "mud season" going.
But people were now focused on the strange spectral characteristics and
overall surreal feel of the rapidly fading light.
I set the camera going to record the next ten minutes or so of video,
and then basically ignored it to simply watch the eclipse itself.
The descent into the darkness of totality was remarkably quick -- faster
than in 2017, it felt like, possibly because the effective moon shadow was
bigger this time and making for a smaller, faster, and more point-source
intense "diamond ring".
And with the collective viewing-party that this had turned into, all the group emotions we've witnessed in countless videos of larger gatherings came up, as people were cheering and howling and crying and carrying on as our little piece of the world plunged into darkness. It was really quite profound, bringing home the enormous scale that this was happening on. |
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| One of the better totality shots, swiped from Reddit |
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Everyone saw that big triangular prominence on the bottom, and several of
the other smaller ones around the periphery.
There was no real point in trying to shoot the corona with the only other
camera I had, on the phone, so I just watched with the binoculars and
enjoyed the visuals.
I figured there would be plenty of much better images to find afterward.
And of course NASA's view from the entirely different perspective in the ISS is super-interesting, and kind of puts the whole scale in context. |
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| Eclipse shadow from ISS, looking southeast across St. Lawrence river |
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The moon's shadow is anything but sharp, because the Sun is not a point
source!
It's like the *inverse* of the pattern from a fresnel-type lighting
fixture -- a fuzzy darkness, instead of a fuzzy light.
So any attempt to capture terrestrial "shadow motion" would be more an overall
impression of changes at varying distance, rather than any visible traveling
edge.
This ISS image would have been from a little after our totality, when the
umbra was over northern Maine.
This view is more or less opposite the cloudcover one from the GOES16
satellite.
And there's our same advancing cloud cover, but not solid enough to really
block all the view.
For more orientation, the "forearm" of Cape Cod is just barely peeking out
past the farther end of the cloud front.
It turned out that not only was Burlington fine for viewing with the thin cirrus layer overhead after all, most of NY state out as far as Buffalo got a fairly acceptable view of totality. In fact, the haze gave those viewers another way to see the shadow progress, via looking up at a distant surface instead of being up at elevation looking down at the surrounding land. Still, where I was, we essentially had both. |
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| Another shot from Reddit, likely closer to edge of totality band |
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Another nicely filtered shot found on Reddit was evidently from a little
closer to the southern edge of totality, as the lower rim of the corona is
brighter and the prominences along the lower part are more evident.
There *is* some variation in what parts of the corona are seen more or less,
because the moon at perigee is larger with respect to the solar disk and
where you are under the shadow matters more.
This was more obvious right-to-left, of course, as edge details became more
obvious on the right toward the end of the totality time.
The appearance of the second "diamond ring" always comes as a surprise, a sharp reminder to put your viewing glasses back on. This also elicited cheers and hollering from those present, but not quite as intense as when heading into totality. The brightening was equally and eerily rapid, and as the light re-established itself over the landscape people's thoughts immediately turned to the process, nay, challenge, of getting home. Maybe a very lucky few would "beat the traffic" if they left right then and hauled ass; I had long since decided that I was in no hurry to get out of there, especially buried as I was behind four rows deep of parked cars. All of that was perfectly okay. Quite a few congenial conversations were held in the parking lot for an hour or more afterward, as people started to extract their cars and filter out. I did process up two derivatives from my westward-viewing video later. Being able to view the passage of the shadow as conceptual "motion" needed about a 10x or faster timelapse speedup. I wound up using 12x, eventually had via extracting the relevant time period and running that through a one-line albeit VERY non-intuitive command:
The two results went up for perusal a day or two afterward, still well in advance of completing the rest of this writeup, but duly sent to friends and spammed into some number of forums I'd been tracking.
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| Spamming my timelapse video into various Discords |
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In the timelapse, the most notable "motion" is the upward brightening of the
western sky, followed by each successive layer of horizon brightening
toward us near the end.
It really is kind of subtle, but clearly has a direction.
And of course the camera is trying to auto-compensate for the light level
the whole time in a somewhat jerky way.
[By contrast, here's a much
faster timelapse
someone posted to Reddit.]
The reactions of everyone around me are real-time and hilarious, with
unavoidable wind noise, but nonetheless shows just how *rapidly* the final
light went out going into totality.
That's the difference between "99.x%" and the real thing.
The Exodus Eventually the last of us hanging out at the trailhead decided to head off, and out of vague curiosity I tooled west across the state toward St. Albans and Burlington instead of south. Why? Because there were Walmarts over there, for starters. I was also curious about any visible aftermath from the crowds that had presumably descended on the lakefront, if it was convenient to get into that area for a brief look. It wasn't, actually, as the Walmart was in the wrong direction out I-87, and I was tired and a little sunburned and simply wanted to pull in for the night at this point. Traffic was remarkably clear getting down to that area, but I knew that trying to go any farther would bring me right into a mess. I also had *so* much to process and catch up on already, I just wanted to stop and get back online for a while and see what other experiences were being detailed in the aftermath. FOMO and all that, it gets addictive when common interests are in play. I still had plenty of charge from my electric co-op stay, but swung by one of the local charger locations just to see what was going on. It was a zoo, with half a dozen cars sitting around waiting for one or two wheezy little 50kW units. This was only one of many charging horror stories I would learn about later. I chuckled at the fact that I had planned ahead and could probably make it most of the way home on what I had, but absolutely would not attempt that now. I continued on to the Walmart and set up camp. It quickly became clear that it was the right decision, and let me avoid getting stuck on the interstates for many hours. |
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| Huge exodus traffic backups made quite a bit of news across the country |
| It was no surprise that the monumental post-eclipse traffic jams made the news all over. 2017 on steroids, perhaps. As the exodus developed, it was easy to watch its progress. The completely expected yellow and red "worms" quickly developed on the google-traffic maps, and over the next several hours crept *very* slowly southward. |
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| 5:30 pm | 8:00 pm | 10:00 pm |
| Quite a few people described finally getting home as late as 5AM the next morning, especially if they'd had to wait around for chargers on top of the rest of it. If it really had been the Zombie Apocalypse, all the EV drivers would be the first victims! I happily slept through all of that, but for another brief check of traffic around 3AM when I happened to wake up. For some reason Franconia Notch was still problematic, but that's probably just because it frequently is anyway. |
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| Franconia Notch still a traffic bottleneck in the wee hours |
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I made a leisurely exit the next morning after things had pretty much
cleared out, and my route home was clear sailing, even on a normal weekday
morning.
I found a completely unoccupied charger site at another electric-company
office near Bethel, my first test of one on the Flo network in fact, and my
Chargepoint fob worked just fine to start it as they have a convenient
roaming agreement.
The trash cans at the Hooksett rest stop southbound looked like a bomb had gone
off there, and things had been busy all morning with travelers still coming
home from up north, but they handled it.
Wrapup
In general, my trip was a huge success and a great experience.
Planning paid off.
Even the people stuck in homeward traffic were mostly accepting of it as
part of their own adventures, and generally laughed it off.
The Green Mountain folks posted a fairly
glowing review
of how visitors treated their state and its concerns.
What follows is taken from a quick preliminary summary and a handful of links
I sent to some colleagues shortly after the event, that aren't already linked
inline above.
Here's a Youtube from Cleveland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zto3TcfB_oI althogh she gets the order of "diamond ring" and "bailey's beads" wrong. Then in this one from Dallas that just looks at the crowd, you can sort of see how weird the light gets as totality is imminent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FZMurmE1c When you're in a bunch of people like that there is quite a bit of infectious emotion running around, which seems odd, but you can definitely get the sense of enthusiasm from the crowd reactions in these. Maybe it's because the scale of all this is so much bigger than us, or something like that. "We did it" is kind of an odd thing to say, since *we* didn't do anything to bring this about, just traveled a bit to observe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jILJCJ0KpdM
Finally we have one mostly centered on Vermont, and a good general overview of happenings all over the country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3yXYmvz9ss
which you don't have to watch all of when it starts to get sappy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV9BAe7hiaQ There are many more such videos out there, which likely show up in the Youtube suggestions down the right side as you watch any of these. I did my second overnight near Burlington, avoiding all of THIS: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2024/04/10/eclipse-traffic-new-hampshire/
and it was smooth sailing home the next day.
All in all the trip was a blast, I'm glad I did it.
We also can't put this in the past without seeing NASA's wrapup of the day, where the ISS shot comes from. And to their credit, folks back home who weren't making the trip to totality were still making the best of it. In the research/planning process and the running progress of the trip, I collected *so* many fascinating pointers to relevant info that it's impractical to try and reproduce all of it here. A little googling for "eclipse 2024" and maybe adding "vermont" is likely to find way more than one could easily absorb. It was a rare good kind of "mass hysteria" that the country got swept up in, the kind that doesn't cause harm to others and puts a smile on everyone's face and a positive spin to our lives on this little blue rock as a whole.
_H* 240513 |