Wispy clouds over the Asheville Watershed have a way of making themselves known.

From the Glassmine Falls Overlook a few weeks ago, those thin droplets wrapped a partial lunar eclipse and threw a ring of color around the moon. My friend Sherrye Trice named the image “Gaia’s Eye”: the living Earth looking back at the Sturgeon Moon. The mountains supplied the cloud. The sky supplied the light.

On the first day of Fall 2026, the same moisture worked a different shift.

In the past ten days, Badger has photographed three unforgettable rainbows in scenes so complete there was nothing left to ask of them.

The first came on September 12 from the summit platform on Mount Pisgah. Rock Sprite Kitty Myers and I had climbed the steep, wet rock trail inside a socked-in cloud, resigned to a no-view afternoon at the top. Shortly after arrival, the fog fortuitously parted, Asheville appeared sixteen miles away “as the crow flies” and a vibrant rainbow hung above the cloud bank.

A second arc found a Badger with camera in hand in the days that followed above his favorite perch on Cisco Mountain in a cloud backlit by a sunset. Whew!

The third is this article’s featured image, taken on this year’s Autumnal Equinox. That evening at 8:05 PM EDT, the sun crossed the equator heading south just as the rainbow appeared in the watershed. The sky had simultaneously signed the season: storm light on the ridges, fog in the watershed, morning glories and asters in the foreground, and a rainbow framing the famous Seven Sisters.

Those clouds are not merely decoration. They make the water that feeds North Fork that forms the Swannanoa and shakes hands with Asheville and eventually Tennessee. They diffract moonlight into Gaia’s Eye. They also broke sunlight into three rainbows photographed by Badger in ten days.

Some weeks the sky is silent. These past ten days the sky kept answering.

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