First rainy Rose Parade in decades rolls through Pasadena

As a steady rain pounded Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena early Thursday, Michael Brooks hunched beneath a daisy-printed umbrella, guarding his family’s front-row seats for the 137th Rose Parade.

The 41-year-old Monterey Park resident clasped a cup of hot chocolate. Despite the deluge, he smiled from his lawn chair.

It was his first time attending the Rose Parade in person, he said. Why wouldn’t he be happy?

“I was not going to miss this opportunity,” Brooks said. “I had to be right here, front row, for my mother-in-law, for my wife, for my kids.”

This Rose Parade was the first in 20 years to take place in the rain.

It was just the 11th rainy Rose Parade since the event — meant to showcase Southern California’s mild winters — began in 1890.

By 10 a.m. Thursday, just as the parade was wrapping up at the beginning of the 5.5-mile route, the storm had dumped 1.21 inches of rain on eastern Pasadena over the preceding 12 hours, according to the National Weather Service in Oxnard. Downtown Los Angeles had received 1.33 inches.

Hard-core parade fans camped overnight along the route, huddling beneath building awnings and raincoats as they rang in the new year.

They included Tracy Tankersley, who welcomed 2026 by guarding 15 lawn chairs on Colorado Boulevard all night.

It was, in essence, a family reunion. Tankersley drove from San Diego on Wednesday with her son and son-in-law to join her mother on the route. Her other son, his wife and their five children came from Colorado.

Tankersley held out hope for dry skies, despite the forecasts. When rain threatened in years past, the sun always came out just in time. This year, though, “it proved me wrong,” she said.

When she and her family camp out, they’re usually surrounded by spectators packing the route, lying on mattresses, sharing stories around fire pits. This year, Tankersley spent the frigid night alone, dozing off briefly while the rest of her family snoozed in nearby vehicles.

She said it “was a different Rose,” but still an experience to remember.

Once the parade got going, thousands of poncho-clad people lined the route. The rain fluctuated throughout the morning, from light drizzle to steady downpour.

Shortly before 7 a.m., revelers in raincoats shuffled into prime parade-viewing position on a bridge above the 134 Freeway.

Roni Jones and her mother, Cheryl Conley, of Altadena, said they fondly remember the last time it rained on the parade in 2006.

“People come together and make it happen and make it work,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of local excitement, and then there’s the excitement of the football game. … When they said it’s gonna rain? We don’t care.”

The women said they were proud graduates of John Muir High School in Pasadena — Jones, Class of 1986; Conley, Class of 1966 — and that the parade, thankfully, has not changed much since those days.

The event was a bright spot after a difficult year. Conley lost her longtime home in the Eaton fire, which destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena, just a few miles north of the parade route. But she was joyful on New Year’s Day 2026, and grateful for “the support that we’ve had from the community, just the love and care.”

A parade float dedicated to victims of the L.A. wildfires became — briefly — a scene of protest after activists unfurled a banner that said: “AG Bonta, Altadena Demands An Investigation.”

A photo of the banner, which according to LAist was quickly removed from view, was posted on the social media sites of a number of Altadena activist groups. In a caption below one such post, one person wrote that “Los Angeles County officials need to be held accountable for negligence, civil rights or unlawful conduct.”

Before the parade began Thursday, a small group of women from the San Fernando Valley donned ponchos and dragged blue coolers containing some 600 tamales along Colorado Boulevard.

It was their first year to sell food at the Rose Parade, said Kayla Montes, 22, of Pacoima.

Their $5 tamales were selling well amid the chill. The women woke up at 2 a.m. and said they were happily energetic.

“We expect to still sell out today,” Montes said.

The 605 All Star Band performs in the 2025 Rose Bowl Parade along Colorado Boulevard, in Pasadena.

(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)

Typically, New Year’s Day is rain-free in the Los Angeles area.

According to the National Weather Service, rain has fallen on just 10% of all New Year’s Days between 1878 and 2025. In 1934, it rained 3.12 inches in Pasadena — the most ever on the holiday. That was also the year it rained more than one inch on the first day of the year in Los Angeles.

The weather service has predicted 1.53 inches on Thursday.

The Rose Parade started in 1890 as a promotional event by the Valley Hunt Club, a social organization, to show off Pasadena’s famously mild winter weather.

“In New York, people are buried in snow. Here, our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise,” Charles F. Holder, one of the parade’s originators, said at one of the club’s meetings as the parade was being planned for the first time, according to the Tournament of Roses.

The earliest “floats” were horse-drawn carriages adorned with flowers.

According to Rose Parade officials, the only other years that have had a wet parade have been 1895, 1899, 1906, 1910, 1916, 1922, 1934, 1937, 1955 and 2006.

In 1899, The Times reported that “the heavens were ungracious,” and “after nine years of sunshiny success, the tenth annual procession of the Tournament of Roses Association was drowned out by a rainstorm.”

Still, the parade carried on. It was “about half a mile long and took fifteen minutes to pass a given point,” The Times reported. “In spite of the bad weather a large number of strangers came to the city to see it.”

The parade has never been canceled because of wet weather. The last time it was nixed was in 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic — and that was the first cancellation since World War II.

When it rained on the parade in 2006, four floats — from the cities of Burbank and Sierra Madre, Walt Disney Co., and Trader Joe’s — broke down amid the wet conditions, The Times reported then.

This year’s parade theme was “The Magic in Teamwork,” and the parade marshal was Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the Los Angeles Lakers legend and billionaire businessman who is a co-owner of the Dodgers, Sparks and other professional sports franchises.

Along the route, Johnson peeked out of a vintage vehicle adorned with floral basketballs. The vehicle’s top was up, but he stuck his hand out the open window to wave.

Some spectators found clever ways of keeping dry. Jeff Landis of Glendale, 44, fashioned two heavy-duty trash bags as an extra hydrophobic layer for his two children.

“I imagine a sickness might go around after today,” Landis said. He laughed as the two kids waddled in black bags behind him. “Gotta stay dry.”

A vintage Disneyland vehicle rolled toward the front of the parade, with Minnie Mouse clad in a red-and-white polka dot dress and Mickey sporting a tuxedo with a yellow bowtie. They were joined by dozens of military veterans who now work as Disney cast members, strolling along in ponchos and Minnie ears.

They were followed by a float from San Francisco, the foggy, drizzly city that just experienced its coldest summer in decades.

The float by the San Francisco Travel Assn. won this year’s Extraordinaire Award from the Tournament of Roses. It featured the Golden Gate Bridge, the Victorian houses known as The Painted Ladies, and sea lions — all of which looked perfectly at home beneath the gray, drizzly skies of Pasadena.

The student-built Cal Poly Universities float took the top honors in the Rose Parade, winning the Sweepstakes Award for “most beautiful entry.”

The float, called “Jungle Jumpstart,” featured a 40-foot robot, depicted as lying with injuries on the rainforest floor. It was surrounded by colorful animals who are repairing the robot as it holds a red, yellow and blue parrot in its outstretched hand.

In honor of the “Magic in Teamwork” parade theme, the float showcased “the dynamics between nature and technology through the story of rainforest denizens coming together to restore a robot friend with what they know best — the jungle!” Cal Poly said in a news release.

“Our jungle engineers — a frog, a monkey, a jaguar and lemurs — work around the robot to bring it back to life,” Aubrey Goings, president of the parade team at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said in the statement. “They even incorporate fallen branches and plants into their repairs, symbolizing their acceptance of the robot into their ecosystem. A toucan, standing proudly atop a tree stump, is focused on the antenna of the robot, while also making sure everything below is going smoothly.”

A float commissioned by America250, the bipartisan organization established by Congress in 2016 to plan the nation’s upcoming semiquincentennial, featured three bald eagles soaring above mountains and waterfalls. Their wings, a bit weighted down by water, flapped as the float rolled.

Aboard the Lutheran Hour Ministries float, which included an enormous blimp that read, “Team Jesus / All Welcome,” most of the riders wore ponchos. But a white-robe-clad Jesus — known for walking on water, not shielding himself from it — did not.

Claretta Surratt, 49, from Lancaster, watched the flowery extravaganza from beneath a black Juicy Couture umbrella and was bundled in a quilted jacket. She has always watched the parade on TV but decided to drive south with her daughter to see the parade in person this year.

It was wet. Cold. And the crowd was smaller than in years past. But, she said, it was worth it.

“Even with the rain, I love it,” she said. “I love seeing everybody in person.”

Times staff writers Alex Wigglesworth, Gavin J. Quinton and Jessica Garrison contributed to this report.