Rain

It rained here yesterday. We all know what rain looks like so I didn't take any pictures. So what's the big deal? Well, it's the first measurable rain here since February. Typically, the sky is blue and clear all day, every day from February through June. In late June clouds start to form, promising rain some day in the future. Nobody around here expects to see any rain until July 4th which is the local start of the "monsoon season". The monsoon season generally lasts through July and August and then tapers off by September when cooler weather returns. During the monsoon season, clouds develop during the morning and then it's supposed to rain in the afternoon for an hour or so and cool things off and then there's a refreshing evening. Well, that hasn't happened so far but I'm hoping.

Because of the lack of rain in the spring and early summer, this area is dry. I mean parched, crunchy, crumble-when-you-touch-it dry. The plants are shriveled, the animals are scruffy, the dust is inescapable. And life depends on water. So anything you want to live has to be watered. Every day. Regardless. Every plant and animal we have here gets watered every day by running a hose from water tanks. We have plastic tanks in the back of a pickup that we take to town to load up.

We have a sky-pond, around here it's called a "tank", down the hill for watering the horses but it's been nothing but baked clay for months. We need several days of hard rain to fill it up. Yesterdays rain just made it muddy but we're supposed to get more rain today and tomorrow so we've got hopes. The wells here just don't flow enough to provide for more than the house. Even then, it's a matter of running the well water on a twice daily basis into large holding tanks and then using that for household needs. The wells themselves can't handle the straight house demand. Back East, we wouldn't build unless we had a copious water supply but out here, water is so scarce that working with meager supplies is commonplace. We have to go to town to wash our vehicles.

The whole weather pattern is so different from the East that it's disorienting. I'm used to looking to the sky and reading the clouds, but the patterns I'm used to finding in the East don't happen out here. They have the same cloud types of course, but they don't act the same. At home the rain comes mostly from frontal passages. Everything along the path of the front get wet, often several states at a time. Out here the clouds form and dump rain on a specific spot without much movement. So it rains over the hill but not on us. We can watch it happen day after day. The other night we watched an electrical storm for over an hour that barely moved twenty miles. It was 80-100 miles away from us and the lightning was spectacular but we couldn't even hear the thunder.

When it does rain, it comes down hard. Yesterday it was raining at the rate of 2" per minute while it lasted. This means that there's lots of runoff. There lots and lots of dry ditches in the West, called "washes". When it rains miles away these ditches fill up with walls of moving water. These Flash Floods in the washes are enormously dangerous and we're constantly warned to watch out for them in rainy weather. Many washes cross roads and can sweep vehicles away in an instant, much less anybody walking in one. A wash can become dangerous in an instant from rain falling miles and miles away, even if where the wash is is sunny and clear. And a flash flood can move boulders the size of small cars. I've never witnessed one but I've seen the pictures and they are impressive.

So, we're hoping for more rain and watching the weather. I expected this trip to be quite an experience and it sure is so far.