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It wasn’t rain. It certainly wasn’t snow.

So what was it last Friday that turned the radar in the La Crosse area into a sea of white?

It turns out that it was a gigantic hatch of mayflies.

The bugs were so thick that they showed up as a rainstorm of mayflies on National Weather Service radar.

For about 1 1/2 hours starting at 9 p.m., the insects drifted north, with the radar showing them blanketing areas along the Mississippi River.

“They were dive-bombing in the root beer floats,” said Gary Rudy, owner of Rudy’s Drive-In, whose family has been slinging burgers and soft drinks since 1966.

“It hasn’t been that bad in a long time.”

At Riverfest, the city’s summer festival, the mayflies were buzzing revelers, and folks were scraping the insects off the bottoms of their shoes.