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Since the debacle in 2020, even the mere thought of Memorial Day Weekend has struck fear in the minds of daily visitors to Eaton Canyon. Each year, this specific weekend sees the highest influx of Angelinos drawn by the holiday, the onset of summer, favorable weather, and high creek flows. The combination of COVID-19 and TikTok has allowed the canyon to surge in popularity across Southern California, with the main waterfall frequently being a top result when one searches “Waterfalls in Los Angeles.” On top of that, Eaton Canyon is one of the most centrally located and accessible waterfalls within Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States.

As a consequence to all of this, approximately 35,000 to 50,000 people visited Eaton Canyon between Saturday morning, May 25th and Monday evening, May 27th, 2024. Only Memorial Day weekend 2020 itself was busier.

The mass influx of people into the canyon has led to multiple issues in the area, including excessive trash, graffiti, unlicensed vendors, illegal parking, and loud music. The busy weekend has renewed conversations among locals who want to do something about the Disneyland-type visitation levels, with calls for more sheriffs, more park rangers, a fee for entry, a towing company on stand-by, and even a return to the COVID-era reservation system. The Angeles National Forest does not consider the waterfall trail a real trail, and thus no forest rangers occupy the area.

Hopes are that visitation will drop in the canyon after Big Santa Anita Canyon, which has been closed since August 2020 due to the Bobcat Fire and the 2023 floods, will reopen on June 1st.

Between November 2022 and May 2024, Eaton Canyon has experienced an extraordinary number of rainstorms, including atmospheric rivers, lightning storms, cold fronts, monsoon surges, and even its first landfalling tropical cyclone in 87 years. These remarkable storms have collectively delivered between 75 and 100 inches of rainfall throughout the canyon, marking this the wettest 18-month period in 117 years of recorded weather history. Today, a walk through the canyon reveals an unfamiliar landscape, with moss-covered trees, lush poison oak, and dense vegetation in nearly every direction. In some areas, the scene looks much more like a subtropical rainforest than a semi-arid mediterranean climate. This excess rainfall has also meant relief from our historic megadrought, increased biodiversity, and healthy water levels in Eaton Creek.

During that same 18-month period, however, average temperatures in Eaton Canyon have been 5.37°F above the preindustrial average. This combination of extreme wetness and heat is unprecedented in recorded history and likely unmatched in the past 3,000,000 years since Earth was last this warm.

Despite the current beauty of the canyon, there is a danger hiding in the brush; one that has the potential to destroy everything we know and love.

For many, the photograph above showcases Eaton Canyon’s incredible untamed, natural beauty. The thick brush is full of fungi, lichens, mosses, invertebrates, birds, and even the occasional mammal. However, for those wildfire-cautious among us, the scene above is also rather alarming. Unlike many parts of the word, California experiences an annual summer drought from June through November, during which rainfall is minimal or nonexistent. This lush vegetation is not expected to get any appreciable precipitation for the next 6 months, and it is therefore expected to dry out.

Wildfires need three main ingredients to ignite: oxygen, heat, and dry fuel. California’s wildfires are significantly influenced by the availability of dry fuel, such as dead trees, leaf matter, and chaparral brush. The relationship between wet and dry years plays a crucial role in determining wildfire risk:

• Wet year followed by a wet year: Abundant fuel that remains too wet to burn explosively.
• Dry year followed by a wet year: Limited fuel that remains too wet to ignite easily.
• Wet year followed by a dry year: Abundant fuel that becomes dangerously dry. (see: 2020 California firestorms)
• Dry year followed by a dry year: Limited fuel that is highly flammable.

Throughout summer and autumn 2024, the vegetation in Eaton Canyon will likely remain too wet to support an explosive wildfire, as both 2023 and 2024 were much wetter than average. However, if winter 2025 is dry, the massive amounts of fuel in the canyon will continue to dry out, posing an extraordinarily dangerous situation come summer and autumn 2025. Radically increasing summer temperatures also increase evaporation which accelerates the drying-out of fuels.

Eaton Canyon will be destroyed by a wildfire again sometime in the future, just like it was in 1978 and 1993. With the area hotter than ever before and thick brush overcrowding the canyon, this time it could be far, far worse.

On Friday night, May 10, 2024, an enormous G5 solar storm struck planet Earth after five coronal mass ejections (CMEs) moving at varying speeds through the solar system converged over the planet. The aurora borealis was observed all across North America, with reports as far south as Florida, Hawai’i, Mexico, and even the Caribbean. The aurora also visited California, where onlookers in the Angeles National Forest above the marine layer we able to observe pillars of red light to the north. A Kp Index of about 8.67 or higher is needed to observe the aurora borealis with the naked eye at 34° latitude and reduced light pollution.

How does it work?

The sun goes through 11-year cycles of sunspot activity that can observed over decades by satellite instrumentation. When sunspot activity peaks, a phenomena known as a coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can occur several times per Earth day. When the 11-year cycle bottoms out, days or even weeks can pass without any CMEs from the sun.

Since the sun spins, it creates its own magnetic field just like Earth. The insides of the sun are so hot and pressurized that the magnetic field lines within the sun can become tangled up and kinked. When they kink, excess energy can get trapped in small area, and this excess energy will push outward towards the sun’s surface. If it is strong enough, it’ll blast through the sun’s surface in a massive explosion that can become larger than the planet Jupiter in a matter of minutes. These explosions are called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs for short. In the process, positively charged protons get blasted out into outer space. 

A coronal mass ejection (CME) also sends out a magnetic flux, which are shockwaves in the magnetic field. Combined with the charged protons, the two will race off into space at anywhere between 1,000,000 MPH and 5,000,000 MPH in velocity depending on how severe the CME was. Once the CMEs leave the surface of the sun, they are called solar storms. Solar storms can overwhelm the Earth’s magnetic field and excite gasses in the upper atmosphere. This process is what causes the aurora.

On Wednesday morning, May 8th at around 8:00 UTC, two CMEs ejected from the sun and began racing right towards planet Earth. Later in the day Wednesday, another two average-strength CMEs exploded from the sun, also headed in the Earth’s direction. Finally, on Thursday morning, an extremely powerful CME occurred moving much faster than the rest. When CMEs leave the sun, an entire quarter of the solar system can be impacted, so it isn’t unusual for any planet to be hit by one. What was unusual this time, however, was that all 5 CMEs converged simultaneously over planet Earth leading to what is now the strongest solar storm of the generation. This animation from the University of Reading shows what multiple solar storms converging over the Earth (black dot) looks like:

Solar storms of this magnitude have a return period of about once every 20 years. What made Friday’s event so special was that it occurred during a new moon which helped lower light levels. Additionally, a marine cloud deck in place over the coastal valleys drastically lowered light pollution in upper Eaton Canyon.

A mad rush to Mount Wilson on Saturday night by thousands of spectators hoping to catch a glimpse did not yield any result, as the solar storm had already passed. Indeed, Friday night was the only night to view the northern lights in Los Angeles County.

“The aurora borealis was a no show up from Mt. Wilson tonight [Saturday]. It was a rowdy scene, and if I had known it would be so insanely attended, I would have probably stayed home. When we finally did get out it was a funeral procession of hundreds of cars the entire way down [the Angeles Crest Highway.]”

– Facebook user

Here are some photographs of the event in and around upper Eaton Canyon: