Ponchos bloomed like wildflowers along Colorado Boulevard Thursday morning as the 137th Rose Parade cheerfully thumbed its nose at the weather forecast and marched on through a steady, soaking rain. It wasn’t the postcard-perfect, blue-sky Rose Parade beamed into living rooms for decades — but for many spectators, that was exactly the charm.
Rain slicked the pavement, sawdust turned dirt into quicksand, ponchos rustled, and floats glistened as if freshly lacquered, their roses and seeds sparkling under gray skies. And despite the downpour — or maybe because of it — the crowd energy felt defiant, joyful, and downright giddy. Pasadena showed up. So did the parade.
“This is my first Rose Parade. I’ve seen them all on TV. And they were always sunny,” laughed Anne Lee Bohon of Elkhart, Indiana, who was visiting the Rose Parade for the first time. Wrapped in a blue plastic poncho and clutching a soggy parade program, Martin grinned as another float rolled by. “But this? This is something else.”
She wasn’t wrong.
One of the early crowd-pleasers was the San Diego zoo wild animal park float, with animated elephants gathering by a waterfall. Thousands of fresh flowers — somehow holding their own against the weather — formed a moving work of art that drew applause from curbside camps who had been up since long before dawn. Volunteers waved enthusiastically, rainwater dripping from flower petals onto the street below.
Then came the music. The Los Angeles All City Marching Band powered through the wet conditions with polished precision, brass shining and drumlines unfazed. Their performance felt like a love letter to the hometown crowd, many of whom yelled encouragement by name as the band marched past. Not far behind, the Morgan State University “Machine,” with its dancing teams, delivered a big, buoyant sound that cut cleanly through the rain, earning standing ovations — or as close as you can get when everyone’s balancing coffee cups.
It was a year that began with fire and ended with raindrops. Between floats and bands, the crowd bonded in classic Rose Parade fashion, weather or no weather, and strangers laughed as they skipped over puddles that kids danced in.
In a memorable year, it was a parade for the ages. Veterans of the parade seemed to say, this is the “Pasadena Way.”
By the time the final entries passed and the rain began to ease, there was a shared sense that something special had happened. The 137th Rose Parade didn’t just survive the storm — it embraced it.
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