Vancouver is known for its mild weather - there are no extremes. In the three years I’ve been here we have never had a proper storm - you get two flashes of lightning and a rumble of thunder and that’s it, storm over.

This weekend everything changed. A beautiful and hot sunny day turned in a wild stormy night. There were at least 2 storms circling round our house, coming in from the East. I’ve never seen so much lightning - it was forking down and dancing across the sky and was so pretty. Crashing thunder and heavy rain completed the picture. Once the storms had started to pass over us on their way downtown the sun set and caused the sky to turn such a magnificent shade of orange that I just had to go out in the pouring rain and thunder to look at it in awe. We can’t actually see the sun set from where we live, but you could tell that the sunset was totally stunning.

There were fireworks scheduled for Saturday night - South Africa’s entry in the Festival of Light. We were sure they were going to cancel it, but no. 300,000 people still turned up and were treated to fireworks in a thunderstorm - South Africa v God. God won, hand’s down.

Here is a video - a time-lapse of photos taken over the 24 hours showing the sunny day, the storm, the sunset and the fireworks:

Time-lapse Vancouver July 25th

And here’s a still from the same camera showing the incredible orange sky. This hasn’t been doctored at all and as we all know pictures of sunsets never show how beautiful it really is - still it is pretty apocolyptic.

An interesting article in the Vancouver Sun today

Humans are not going to stop wanting to spread out into beautiful wilderness areas, constructing houses and homesteads that encroach onto the traditional territory of wild animals, but the importance of preserving wildlife corridors to enable cougars, bears and other predators to get from one side of their habitat to another without having to come into contact with humans is essential to stop this currently small issue becoming a major problem.