Tag Archives: Rain

Thunder In The Valley

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This is Monument valley. The same Monument valley John Wayne road thru in Stagecoach and many other films. Usually when you see pictures of the valley it’s under bright sun and clear skies, with the buttes in stark relief against the sky, hardly a cloud to be seen, the timeless desert shot from countless calendars. But that’s not always the case as can be seen in the image above.

Monument valley averages around 7″ of rain a year and as we drove towards the entrance in this storm it looked like it was getting all 7″ at once. If you ‘re from the Midwest or the northern tier of the our country you are used to seeing rain storms that last all day or longer sometimes. That’s usually not how our western storms go. With few exceptions our storms race in with an unconstrained fury and drop all of its moisture in a hurry. Our storms don’t fool around. The energy builds up over the mountains, the clouds grow into the very upper reaches of the sky then all hell  breaks loose. Rain, hail, sometimes even snow if you’re real lucky, and wind to blow your lawn chairs into New Mexico.

This storm has just about completed its job as you can see by the sun trying to break through the clouds, yet it is still raining hard enough on the highway that the windshield wipers are having trouble handling it. When a storm like this happens you just wait it out. The ground is going to be saturated and you want to stay way clear of any arroyos or small ditches, even low depressions in the highway as all that water has to go somewhere and it all doesn’t soak into the ground. It moves through the area with enough force to wash away cars and trucks as it they were rubber ducks and it happens real fast.

The roads in the valley are unpaved and made up of a combination of clay, decomposed sandstone, some gravel and that combination, when water is added to it, turns into an adhesive mixture that will coat your tires and fill up your wheel wells until you cannot turn your steering wheel. Besides having the adhesive strength of gorilla glue it turns into a cement-like substance that nearly has to be jack hammered out when it sets up. The general rule of thumb is, don’t drive on those roads until they’ve had a chance to dry out some.

This shot was taken during April in the mid-afternoon and the next morning you could drive the roads with no problems, in fact in some areas you could raise dust as you drove. That is if you didn’t make the mistake of parking in some low area where water runs through. If you did you’re probably in Lake Powell right now. Things happen quickly out here and you need to pay strict attention to your surroundings, but that’s just part of the drama of the West. Some folks thrive on it.

Virga

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Virga or the art of teasing as played by Mother Nature, is when the rain falls from the sky but doesn’t reach the earth below. It evaporates right before it should hit the ground. It’s like a giant game of “She loves me, She loves me not” where she pulls the petals off her garden of clouds and when she pulls one while gently singing “She Loves me”, the rain will fall to the ground and the dry earth knows she loves it. However when she pulls the “She loves Me Not” petal the rain falls to within inches of the thirsty earth but does not touch it. This is bad. It indicates that she is in a capricious mood and things can go either way. Since Mother Nature knows which petal it is before she pulls it and she’s feeling slightly out of sorts she can pull the “She Loves Me Not” petals all day long. This is what is happening in California right now.

I don’t know what those folks did wrong, it probably has something to do with Nancy Pelosi, but they better get their mind right and straighten things out. Mother Nature has a lot more will-power than all of California, even those parts like Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and can do this as long as she wants. Like hundreds of years if you really tick her off.
 
Marble canyon didn’t do anything wrong though, it just happens to be in a spot where there isn’t much rain, and what rain does fall is used sparingly. Mother Nature actually likes Marble Canyon and the surrounding area so she only teases a little. This time the Virga is sort of a wake up call saying “I’m bringing you some rain guys, get ready”. This moment in time was just a short tease however. When the canyon needs rain she pulls the right petal. The dark clouds in the background were moving in and before you knew it Mother Nature had pulled every “She Loves Me ” petal she could get her hands on and Marble canyon had all the rain it needed and more.

In the mean time anyone who wanted to could sit back and watch the spectacle unfold. The canyon is actually a couple of miles from where this image was taken so the rain didn’t reach out this far. The close-up appearance of the canyon comes from the magic a telephoto lens and the stitching power of Photoshop to put the 13 photos together needed to create this panorama. Click on it to enlarge the image somewhat for a closer look yet. Is this a great world to live in, or what.

Life in A Cloud

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For those of you new to the blog you may not know that The Institute, the source of the many excellent but interesting posts you receive daily, sits high in the Rocky Mountains in Northern Colorado. Not Andes high or Himalayan high, but moderately high at just under 6500′.

So what, you might ask, if you were the rude type. Well, it means that at this altitude, 6500′, we get a lot more weather than folks living lower than us. What might be a rain cloud high in the sky to them may be a raging hail storm at this elevation. They’re looking at the bottom of a cloud and don’t see what’s going on inside it. Or a brisk wind down on the flats might be 70 mph up here and that will scatter your lawn chairs all over hell and back.

Lately we’ve been getting a lot of “fronts” moving in which brings clouds over and around us and often below us, usually all at the same time. I say fronts because we rarely get “backs” unless the clouds move backwards for some reason, which it does sometimes for reasons known only to itself. So I guess that could be considered a “back”.

The Institute buildings sit prominently on a point just below the summit of a world-famous mountain, it, the mountain not the Institute, being featured on many maps and even Google Earth, jutting out into space and consequently into the weather whenever it occurs. Visualize all the many imposing Schloss’s or castles you have seen in magazines, movies, and your imagination along with craggy rustic buildings set in high lonely places and mix them together and you have an idea of what The Institute aspires to look like and fails dismally at, and you have an idea of what we look like.

But getting back to the fronts we spoke of earlier. When they bring the clouds in to envelope us in misty darkness, they are loaded to the very gills with water in the form of suspended droplets completely filling the inside of that cloud. There is simply no room left for anything else. Not even lightning. It is packed tight. When the cloud moves back and forth due to some climatic reason it bangs into whatever happens to be there, like say, The Institute, and as it collides with our buildings the water inside the cloud just adheres to them. Sticks to the sides, saturating everything with impunity, and creates problems that are different than one gets in a rainstorm. The water doesn’t just fall downward and run down the sides like rain, it instantly saturates everything, walls, roof, under the eaves, into every single nook and cranny, sort of like running your house through a car wash. Think grabbing your house by its roof and plunging it into a vat of water until bubbles come out of its little chimney and you have some idea of what it’s like to live in a cloud.

Now before you think that that is a totally bad thing, it’s not. In fact it’s kind of cool. If you’ve done all your proper caulking and waterproofing that is. You can stay inside and light a fire in the fireplace without fear of accidentally burning down the forest from errant embers. You can read, pull your chair right up to the window and watch the cloud move back and forth. Drink hot tea. Think about stuff you don’t normally take time out to think about. Ponder, some. Call your neighbors and say “Hey, you got cloud?” They almost always do if you do. It’s a time to relax and say “Well I don’t have to mow the lawn today.” and just enjoy the weather.

There are other good parts too, like when the clouds move in and when they move out. If the movement happens at either end of the day, like sunrise in the shot above, you get a bonus of seeing morning in a different way. That alone makes up for some of the crap side of living in a cloud. Shortly after that image was taken the cloud moved backwards up the hill and we got wet. But for a brief moment you got to see paradise. Living in a cloud isn’t always a bad thing.

Nanny McFree

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We are in the middle of our annual monsoon season here in Colorado. What that means is everyday around 2 to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, although it sometimes happens sooner, or sometimes later depending on the whims of Mother Nature, it clouds up, the skies get dark, thunder rolls in from the west and it rains. Little gentle rains where things slowly get wet, the air smells fresh and moist and you sit by the open door and drink a nice, slow, hot cup of tea as the entire experience washes over you. A Camelot kind of rain.

On the other hand when some poor misbegotten soul has done something to irritate Mother Nature we get something else entirely. Instead of the Camelot rains we love and wait for, we get the full wrath of weather that you only get in the high mountains. Torrential rains, 30 -40 -50 mph winds that drive the rain against everything in its path with the power of a force 5 hurricane. And if you’ve done something particularly heinous you can have hail, which as you know from your experience of being alive, is really hard rain packed into the size of a BB all the way up to size of a steamer trunk. This falls from the sky and breaks things. That is bad when that happens. Stay indoors. Then because Mother Nature rarely holds a grudge, the storm passes, the sun comes out to shine it golden rays down upon you, the bluebirds return and all is right with the world again.

So what? you say. Well first that’s kind of rude and you might just keep an eye on the skies above in case Mother Nature heard you. The monsoon affects everyone and everything here in the mountains. Even the Mountain Goats on Mt Evans. They and anyone else unlucky enough or unfortunate enough, to be above tree line when one of these big storms hit are in imminent danger of being struck by lightning. Lightning is a whole bunch of electricity, like all the D-cells and other batteries you have in your house, even the ones in your smoke alarms, all wired together at one time, all stuffed into a very narrow place in the sky and when it’s good  and ready it shoots down to the ground and incinerates what ever it hits. This can have adverse effects on your ability to remain alive. This is called “Being Struck By Lightning” or as we know it “Bad Luck.” Every year people are struck by lightning and killed. Like totally. It’s over and that’s that. This is unfortunate and not a laughing matter but it is a fact.

But you rarely see Mountain Goats struck and killed. Why is that we wondered. If anyone is at risk it should be them. They live above tree line, they stay out in the weather even when they shouldn’t and they do not carry any life insurance, nevermind health and accident. So how does that work then.

It turns out that over time, at least over the last 8000 years since the world was created, they have evolved a system that helps them stay alive and well during inclement weather. First the big ones run like the devil and hide. But if you look at your average herd of Mountain Goats you’ll see a large percentage of them are young ones, the kids. Like most kids they are not smart enough to come in out of the rain and so, and here’s where it gets cool, the mother goats got together and devised a plan where everyday one of the mothers is chosen to watch over the kids and if it looks like it’s going to rain,  or especially lightning, she gathers them up into a bunch and stuffs them in the crevices between the rocks and guards them until the storm passes. Nobody gets struck by lightning, they all live and the group survives. Neat, right? Well the mother of the day is called a nanny. Just like Nanny McFree in the image above.

This was documented yesterday as a couple of us trudged up to the top of Mt Evans, all 14,265′ of her, to stand there in the rain and lightning with our tinfoil hats on, and steel toed boots, to see if this was true. It was.

Respite

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Every storm has an end and it looks like we’ve finally caught a break. The torrential rain and flooding with all its damage seems to be subsiding. I just heard from a friend living in a small town near Estes Park that they’ve measured over 14″ of rain since the storm began. That is a lot of rain by anyone’s standards. To put that into perspective the annual average rainfall for Colorado is 15″ per year, they’ve gotten that in less than a week. They’re completely cut off from the outside world because every single road leading in and out of their town is washed out. They’ll probably have to wait for air drops to get resupplied.

Constancy, tenacity, determination all come into play to be successful in a really tough business. These characteristics are carried over into the everyday world and give you the strength to keep fighting when all seems lost. Perhaps the worst is over for now and things can struggle back to normal. I hope so, everyone around here has certainly paid their dues. The image above is from a Yellowstone trip and is the final stage of a huge storm that swept through the valley. The sun breaking through the clouds over the Madison river was a welcome sight and showed that there is always an ending to even the worst problems. Something we can all take to heart.

100 Year Events

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If you think your life is going by faster and faster there is a good chance it is. Out here in Colorado our 100 Year events are coming about every 35 years now. This last week we’ve had torrential rains and unprecedented flooding dumping up to a foot of rain in some areas close by. We got 7.3″ here at the Institute and for us that is a huge amount of rain to get in 2½ days.  That’s not quite biblical or ark building rain but it is a bunch of rain.

There isn’t a lot of up side to that much rain but if there is any, it is the beautiful sunsets we get after and sometimes during one of these big weather events. This image isn’t from this weeks storm, it’s from another 100 year event that we had recently. When the cloud cover is broken and the sun begins to set while it is still raining, and the storm is in the right place just as the sun goes below the horizon, the sun’s rays will shine through the storm clouds and the valley and produce images like this. And occasionally because we live a good wholesome life here at the Institute, I will have my camera at hand when it does. Apparently it is one of the rewards you get for not smoking cigars anymore and eating all that crappy health food you’ve got to eat as you geeze out.

Missed Payments

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What you see here is a sad story. That’s rain out there on the plains and its falling pretty good where its falling and that’s a good thing. But you’ll notice it isn’t falling everywhere, there’s empty spaces between those rain spouts, and that’s the sad part of the story.

Out West here water is more important than anything else. Its more important than politics, religion, money, although all those things play a part in managing it. It’s the actual water itself, the wet part, that is important. There’s been wars fought over it, laws made controlling it, lives ruined for lack of it. It’s a big deal here.

Water is becoming scarcer and scarcer every season and so it’s becoming expensiver and expensiver every season. The powers that be have set up what is called, ‘the Rain Commission’, which is made up of the usual suspects and they’ve managed to set the price on rain. The price being determined by how much rain you want, how long you want it to rain for and how often. And by how much the R.C. can make off it by establishing their regulatory fees. They say its expensive maneuvering those clouds around and timing the rainfall, so if you want rain now, you’ve got to ante up and they aren’t fooling. Get out the big bucks and if you think the price is going to go back down again you’ve been listening to those oil boys too long.

You can own water here and keep it for yourself if you’re a ruthless greedy bastard. Politicians get elected and unelected over it by deciding who gets to use it. We’ve even got a law that says you can’t catch the rain that falls off your roof and use it for your own selfish needs unless you want to go to jail. That rain has to run down unimpeded to where the people who want to control it can get their hands on it. They collect it in big ponds they call reservoirs and fence it off and the people who live around them can’t even swim in it, or go boating on the top of them without the rain owners permission because they own the surface rights to that stored up rain. Consequently bootleg water can be a big business if you’ve got the stomach for it and you can dodge the Rain Commission’s regulators. They’ll disappear you if they catch you dealing water. But folks have a way of working around  things like that. That’s why you rarely see those plastic water bottles littering up our highways out here. As soon as someone sees one it is snatched up and guess what goes in it. Yup, rainwater. You’ll see people out behind the 7-11 passing money over and loading those plastic bottles into their trunks.

Which brings us back to the sad part of our tale. If you look again at that rain falling out on the plains you’ll see that there are spaces between the rainfalls, we mentioned that at the beginning of this story. In the old days, before the ‘Rain Commission’, that rain that’s falling out there would have been a solid unbroken sheet of water running from Denver in the South to Cheyenne in the North. Everybody would have gotten some. And it was free water, a gift from the heavens to make those farmers lives easier. Now you got to pay for that rain. The politicians and the greedy rain owners have put a price on it. They’ve commoditized it. The spaces where the rain isn’t falling are over those poor farmers land that missed their rain payments and so now they don’t get any. No pay, no rain. It’s going to take a lot of trips to the back of the 7-11 and a lot of those plastic water bottles to make up for that lost rainfall for those poor folks. Crops don’t grow themselves, they need that water. There’s going to be a lot of unhappy farmers out there. It also looks like there’s going to be some more politicians out of work soon. I wonder if they’ll take up farming. Probably not.