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‘The Desert Is Many Things…’
The Desert is many things. Forgiving is not one of those things. What doesn’t bite you will stab or sting you in the desert. “When the big rain came, forty days and forty nights, Southern Arizona got half an inch.”
The half an inch isn’t quite true in the Sonoran Desert. About half the yearly rainfall in the Sonoran Desert comes during the Summer Monsoon season.
Although the campers that attended Burning Man were in the Nevada desert, the monsoon season did what the Extinction Rebellion could not do. Heavy monsoon rains closed the road into and out of the event encampment.
The Sonoran Desert is greener than the deserts of California and Nevada. Greenery doesn’t mean it’s any more benevolent than the Mojave Desert. It is the hottest desert in both Mexico and the United States. 100,000 square miles of desert that claims lives every year.
Having lived in the Sonoran Desert, you learn to adapt to the heat. If you go to the grocery store you go straight home after shopping. Ice cream is not going to survive the trip that includes other stops on the way home. Hiking during the summer requires drinking a liter of water every hour on the hike. Outdoor landscape work starts early and ends early in the day.
When the lightning and rain come you obey the ‘Do Not Enter When Flooded’ road signs. That’s called the ‘Stupid Motorist’ law in Arizona. You can be required to pay for the swift water rescue in addition to the regular fine.
Mike Olbinski is a master of time-lapse photography. His video will give you a look at the Summer Monsoon in Arizona.
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Published in Environment
Awestruck.
I took this photo from the patio of the house in Arizona. The Santa Catalina mountains behind the house. The ridge tops are about 7,300 in elevation. The house was at about 3,300 feet in elevation. A winter sunset and we would get some snow in the witner.
I had to share the backyard with bobcats at times.
I do so love the southwest.
Our back view is of the Santa Rita Mountains (south of Tucson), elevation around 9000 ft. We are at 3000 ft. We also have coyotes and bobcats prowling our patio walls. It’s hazy this afternoon – only about 98 degrees. But it is awesome to watch the monsoon roll in over the mountains around 3 in the afternoons.
But they are so cute those little kitty cats!
I’m sure you can explain it, but I do not understand how we cannot, in this day and age, get a supply dump into that area were 73,000 people are stranded. I look forward to your explanation Doug.
Lived in Tucson for a couple of years, in 1986-1988. Monsoons are real. When I explain these massive rainstorms occurring in the desert to people who don’t live there, they look at me like I’m nuts.
From the video, Doug posted, it looks as though you’re standing under a huge bucket that dumps about 1,000,000 gallons of water on you all at once.
It felt good to be out of the rain.
Last summer we had two storms with incredible hail. It broke hundreds of skylights in my little town (which then led to flooding of homes from the rain that followed). Cars that were not under cover were covered with hail pockmarks. We had pop-up repair tents all over town for several months. I heard it was costing folks as much as $8K to get their cars fixed.
At times flash floods can undercut the road. The two-lane highway that leads to the Burning Man site may be flooded. Once the pavement is gone the mud can be so thick that 4-wheel drive vehicles can become useless. During the summer months in the Tucson Sector the Border Patrol Blackhawks spend some time rescuing both illegal migrants and hikers.
Is that the highway the “environmental protesters” tried to block?
County Road 34 runs by what appears to be the entrance to the “camp.”
Leaving Burning Man without the rain in 2022. Looks like fun? It proves my theory that the more people in a confined space means the IQ scores start to plummet, not increase.
Not as bad as I-95 in Virginia that year.
Are those ocotillos growing there? Love those.
I’m sure it makes me a bad person, but I just can’t get too upset about the Burning Man refugees. It’s not quite the feel-good story of the year, but it’s close.
Yup. Not my favorite but my neighbors like them.
We’re trying to get the folks below us to trim their trees below roof line (HOA rules). They’re blocking my valley view!
Last year seemed a pretty good warning, but my guess is it’s viewed as a badge of honor to attend a difficult Burning Man like that. This year, I doubt anyone is feeling it.
You’d have to train at least one of those hippies to open the package. Checkmate!
Wrong thread.
Imagine driving through a pool, several miles long, filled with one foot of grease, on top of several hundred feet of soft, unconsolidated powder. The world’s most aggressive tires in the world will be clogged in the first ten feet, and you will be (trying to be) driving on slicks.
I have been wondering if the Army’s M-113, tracked, armored personnel carrier, could navigate in that stuff without getting stuck. But if you think feet are making a mess of the environment . . .
Anybody else here familiar with Bicycle Lake?
FIFY.
During the year I spent at Ft. Huachuca in the last century, we would take occasional trips to Bisbee over (what I think is) route 90. My buddies would mock “the raging San Pedro” when we crossed the bridge because other than the incongruous greenery, you would never know there was water there. The San Pedro did rage once, we were denied crossing because water covered the land on a wide area on either side. I assume that the desert wildlife made the most of that event. Within a few hours, it was almost as if it never happened.
I took a VW beetle on back roads (with a large water bag, some flares etc) on off days. Rabbits, lizards and snakes seemed surprised to see me. I once stumbled across the charred remains of an old abandoned small ranch and wondered why anyone would have picked that spot. No evidence of water nearby and, if was built early enough, a high likelihood that, Apaches would have been nearby.
The sheer quiet, the size and contents of the nighttime sky in the southern Arizona desert were unlike anything I had experienced back east.
After basic training at the former Fort Bragg, the Army sent me to supply school at Fort Huachuca. It was a wonderful change. The evening walks to the EM Club were memorable.
FINALLY!!!!!! I knew our advanced civilization could solve this problem.
https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-approves-40-billion-worth-of-drugs-to-be-airdropped-to-burning-man
Apparently it’s being done by Europeans.
By the way, the Santa Rita mountains are home to a Jaguar. A second Jaguar may have been sighted in the Santa Rita area.
Wow, another cute little kitty cat!
On the ninth day, I let the horse run free because the desert had turned to sea.