Heading home and slow-going with the west-bound traffic at exactly 6:30 pm yesterday…with a good view of the approaching storm.
Getting closer…bigger….
Eleven minutes later in the below photograph…wasn’t difficult driving, but it was hard to make quality one-handed photographs with the truck blowing side to side….
Very often we see these desert wind storms, dust storms, or haboobs making a lot of noise and throwing a bunch of crap in the air with not much else happening…
…or not happening in our particular part of town, anyway. It’s often that one side of town gets the dust and another side gets the rain….
So it was nice to finally see some rain drops populate the windscreen on the truck…heading north on the 303 now from the I-10…at 6:55 pm in the below photo.
Wipers are coming on soon….
Looking west toward the White Tank Mountains in the below photo…huge dumping of rain….
The above photo (kind of sucks) is nowhere near as dramatic as this image from the Washington Post in July of 2016, but it’s still pretty cool…rain bomb…micro-burst….
Broken trees blowing onto the freeway off ramp…getting close to home….
It’s 7:06 pm in the above photo…36 minutes since the first photo above….
A welcome river of rain washing down our neighborhood street above….
And this is the morning after…two broken tree tops…which is very minimal compared to what I found in other places in the neighborhood…huge trees that must have stood for close to 20 years blown over and crashed through walls and into houses…other big ones uprooted and laying into the street…beautiful mesquite trees in the park toppled over….
Wonderful summer rains in the desert….
August 3, 2018 | Categories: Photos - Outdoors | Tags: Arizona haboob, Arizona monsoon, Arizona photography, desert rain, images made 8-2-2018, monsoon damage, rain bomb, seekraz photography, summer rains | 9 Comments
approaching the end of a long day on the road, i saw clouds over the mountains and foothills and cinder-cones north of flagstaff, it appeared as though it might rain and i even thought i smelled it on the air as i came nearer to the mountain town, looking south and west at what was north and west of the settlement, i didn’t notice a wind, but maybe that is water falling aslant from the darker sky, above a fence-line dividing the earth in someone’s imagination
July 26, 2015 | Categories: Photos - Outdoors | Tags: Arizona, cinder-cones, Coconino County, desert rain, fence-line, Flagstaff Arizona, Highway 89, image made 7-25-2015, photography, road-trip, seekraz photography | 6 Comments
I made these images from atop some of our local desert hills, Sunday, looking west, then north, and then west again as the clouds rolled in and did their thing….
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December 21, 2014 | Categories: Photos - Outdoors | Tags: Arizona, Desert Hills Arizona, desert rain, images made 12-21-2014, north Phoenix Arizona, photography, storm clouds | 26 Comments
the storm from the other night started with only the massing of clouds that covered the stars and then the quiet flashing of lightning in the dark eastern sky
within the passing of ninety minutes or more, or less, the rain was blowing sideways onto the bedroom windows and sliding glass door and there were striking flashes of blue-white light and delayed or immediate crashes of thunder that I could feel rumbling in the bed posts
when I looked outside I could see the rain coming down in a torrent from the street-light-lit sky and hear the thrashing of the wind and rain against the house
I cannot say how long it lasted, as I fell back to sleep while it was still underway
in the morning I found the feeble sun shining weakly through some lower clouds and only a few patches of barely blue sky
moments later, the clouds had lowered and the sky was covered with a pewter thickness
the air was wet and cool and carried the scent of a rain-washed desert in its breezes
it was heavy laden with creosote and wet leaves and grasses that had pooled in delta-like triangles and linear forms of sediment along the raceways of temporary streams that ran in the desert night
on my walk along the desert trail, I found those leaves and seeds and twigs and other desert-floor detritus collected in large swaths of poultice-like gatherings and saw the sand in its colors drawn in lines and slides of black and brown in the shapes of tiny gone rivers from the night’s collected rain
it looked like an ocean’s beach after the tide has gone out or after the ever waves have receded each in their cycle and turn, lines and drawn angles and arrows of black grains pulled over and through the surface of the deeper gray-brown sand of the desert’s bed
the quail were fewer in number that morning, as were the wild rabbits that I usually see…only one was out with his white tail and long pink-tan ears, hastily retreating into the desert there
no lizards raced across the trail and into the scrub beneath the trees and fresh washed bushes along the way, but the ants were out in their multitudes, opening their flooded caverns again, collecting the blown and washed seeds and stems from their surround…after the desert rain
August 30, 2014 | Categories: From Somewhere Inside, Just Thoughts | Tags: ants, Creosote, desert, Desert Hills, desert rain, desert storm, monsoon rain, Phoenix Arizona, quail, rabbit | 16 Comments
