Image Courtesy of SKYGLOW
Imagine standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and finding the canyon gone, replaced by a white sea of cloud that laps against the cliffs like surf. That is a total cloud inversion, one of the rarest sights in the national park, and it is the subject of Kaibab Elegy, a time-lapse film by the SKYGLOW project. The film compresses hours of drifting fog into a few minutes, so you can watch the cloud pour, swirl and drain away against the canyon's fixed walls.
Below you can watch the film, learn what causes the phenomenon, and see how the footage fits into SKYGLOW's wider work on light pollution and dark skies.
Watch Kaibab Elegy
The film was posted on Vimeo in May 2017 and covered by Gizmodo on 15 May that year. Its title refers to the Kaibab Plateau and the Kaibab limestone that forms the canyon's upper rim. The Vimeo description says it was shot in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, on a Canon 5DSR, during one of the "extremely rare days when cold air is trapped in the canyon."
Watch the edges as much as the cloud. Because the cliffs and buttes do not move, they act as a ruler for the fog: you can see it rise over ledges, spill through side canyons and sink back as the air warms. Time-lapse is the perfect tool for this. In real time the motion is slow enough to miss; speeded up, it looks almost like a liquid.
What a cloud inversion is
Normally the air gets colder as you go higher. In a temperature inversion, that pattern flips for a while: a layer of cold air sits near the ground and a layer of warmer air lies on top of it. The warm layer works like a lid, stopping the cooler air below from rising and mixing.
In the Grand Canyon the recipe usually looks like this:
- Moisture, often from a recent winter storm that has soaked the ground.
- A clear, calm night, when the ground loses heat quickly and dense cold air drains down into the canyon.
- Warmer air above, which caps the cold pool and traps it below the rim.
- Condensation: as the trapped air cools to its dew point, the moisture forms fog that fills the canyon from wall to wall.
SKYGLOW photographer Harun Mehmedinovic described exactly this combination to Gizmodo: cold air trapped in the canyon, topped by warm air, with moisture and condensation producing the fog.
How rare is it?
Partial inversions, with fog in parts of the canyon, happen fairly often in winter. A total inversion, where the whole canyon disappears under cloud, is much less common. When a famous one occurred on 11 December 2014, Cory Mottice of the National Weather Service estimated that full inversions happen "about once every several years", though the canyon had also seen one the previous winter. The fog that day had built up overnight after rain, with no wind to clear it.
That rarity is why park rangers, photographers and visitors rush to the rim when one is forecast, and why Mehmedinovic said the team felt extremely lucky to be there to capture it.
Image Courtesy of SKYGLOW
Sunrise over the inversion: cloud fills the canyon to just below the rim, leaving only the highest rock formations above the fog.
The SKYGLOW project behind the film
SKYGLOW is a long-running multimedia project by time-lapse photographers Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinovic. It documents the remaining dark night skies of North America and the growing threat from light pollution, the "sky glow" that spreads above cities and hides the stars. The project is produced in collaboration with the International Dark-Sky Association, now known as DarkSky International.
Alongside short films like this one, SKYGLOW has produced a 192-page hardcover astrophotography book on the history of looking at the sky, the spread of electric outdoor lighting and the dark-sky movement, as well as videos of the stars above Hawaii and of radio astronomy observatories. The Grand Canyon is a natural fit: in 2019 it was certified as an International Dark Sky Park, recognising how well its night skies have been protected.
Seeing a cloud inversion yourself
There is no way to book one, but you can improve your odds:
- Visit in late autumn or winter, when cold nights and storms are most common.
- Watch the forecast after a storm: a clear, calm night following rain or snow is the classic set-up.
- Be on the rim at dawn. Inversions tend to be thickest early and burn off as the sun warms the air.
- Check park updates. Grand Canyon National Park often shares photos when an inversion is under way.
- Dress for the cold and stay behind railings; icy rim trails are slippery in winter.
Even without fog, the same visit can reward you after dark. Away from the lodges, the canyon's skies show the Milky Way in a way most city dwellers rarely see, which is the very thing SKYGLOW set out to celebrate and protect.
Why films like this matter
Time-lapse turns slow processes into something we can follow with our eyes: fog that behaves like a tide, stars that wheel overhead, city lights that bleach the sky. Kaibab Elegy shows a landscape most people think they know in a state very few will ever witness, and it does so as part of a project reminding us that natural darkness is also becoming rare. Both the fog and the stars are worth a trip to the rim.
Sources: SKYGLOW: Kaibab Elegy on Vimeo (video and images courtesy of SKYGLOW, Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan); SKYGLOW project; Gizmodo (15 May 2017); Phys.org / AP: clouds fill Grand Canyon in rare weather event (December 2014).
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