As a steady rain pounded the famed Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena early Thursday, Michael Brooks manned a clutch of lawn chairs and hunched beneath a daisy-printed umbrella as he guarded 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.
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,” Brooks said.
This year’s Rose Parade, which kicked off at 8 a.m. Thursday, is the first in 20 years to take place in the rain.
It is just the 11th rainy Rose Parade since the event — meant to showcase Southern California’s mild winters — began in 1890.
As of 4 a.m. Thursday, the storm system had already dumped 1.12 inches of rain on eastern Pasadena over the last two days, according to the National Weather Service. Downtown Los Angeles had received 0.94 inches. Rain with a chance of thunderstorms will continue throughout the morning, forecasters said.
Hard-core parade fans camped overnight along the route, huddling beneath building awnings and raincoats as they rang in the new year.
They inluded 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, laying 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.
Volunteers decorate Kermit the Frog on the Visit Mississippi “Where Creativity Blooms” float in the run up to the Rose Parade.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Once the parade got going, thousands of people lined the route.
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 house 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, and grateful for “the support that we’ve had from the community, just the love and care.”
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 parade is expected to last around two hours. Roads along the parade route that were closed Wednesday night, will reopen by 2 p.m. Thursday.
The 605 All Star Band performs in the 2025 Rose Bowl Parade along Colorado Boulevard, in Pasadena, on Jan. 1, 2025.
(Ringo Chiu/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.
The last time it rained during the parade was in 2006, and that was only the 10th time in the event’s history, The Times reported then. Four floats — from the cities of Burbank and Sierra Madre, the Walt Disney Co., and Trader Joe’s — broke down amid the wet conditions.
This year’s parade theme is “The Magic in Teamwork,” and the parade marshal will be 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 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, who strolled 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.”
Times staff writers Alex Wigglesworth cand Gavin J. Quinton contributed to this report.