I hadn't even noticed it.

What I stopped for, as I passed through the river canyon Saturday morning, was to catch the first rays of the day on the canyon walls.

A mediocre shot at best. But I take lots of mediocre shots. A lot of crappy ones, too.

Then I turned around to get back into the truck, and saw it behind me.

A sun pillar.

A bright red beacon striking straight up into the sky.

This is no artifact of the camera lens. Nor has it been digitally modified. When the sun is at just the right angle, and the sky is filled with floating ice crystals of just the right size and shape, the sun's rays get focused into a bright beacon.

A light pillar, they call it. I like to think of them as inverted rainbows. I continued around the bend, and at the last oxbow got treated to the entire pillar.

And then, two minutes after it started, conditions were no longer just perfect, and the pillar dropped down, shorter and shorter.

And went away.