Reading this article about K2 in Outside Online, I came across the following passage:
"The magnificence [of K2] can take strange forms. Weeks before he summited, Wickwire was descending with Roskelley to Camp 3, on the knife edge of the northeast ridge, when he witnessed the Specter of Brocken, a rare play of light in which a climber's silhouette is magnified and cast into the center of a cloud, sometimes surrounded by a double rainbow—two perfect circles, one inside the other. "That was the only time I've observed it in over 40 years of climbing," he says.
I witnessed the Specter of Brocken myself this year on Kitadake, although I never knew what is was until today.
Here's Wikipedia's entry on the phenomenon, also known as the Brocken Bow.
And here are a few of the photos (click to enlarge) that I took of it on Kitadake. The shadows on the clouds in the first three photos are of the people waving on the ridge in the last photo.
This Brocken Bow is an intriguingly phenomenon, to say the least.
Posted by: Jan at December 30, 2005 12:03 AM | Permalink to CommentWow, this is crazy. As I reached the summit of Iwo-san on Shiretoko, the clouds rolled in and I couldn't figure out which way to descend. At some point, I witnessed the Brocken Bow, and heading toward it, I found the trail.
A couple hours later I ran into that bear...
The Ainu gods were definitely fucking with me that day.