Friday, July 19, 2013

Monsoon Season

I've given Albuquerque some crap about the pathetic-ness of rain...but that was all pre-monsoon season. My apologies. Even though it's still brown and ugly here.

We had a good, true-to-life monsoon, lasting a good 45 minutes. The girls and I were out running errands and decided to stop before we were done and get home as quickly as possible. I didn't have jackets for anyone and I didn't want to be running in and out of stores repeatedly with no cover.

This is a picture of the rain from our porch. Including all the hail.



Borrowed from Natalie's Facebook page: hail in July! Audrey got hit with a couple really big ones in our sprint from the van to the apartment and she was sure to remind us about it frequently for the rest of the night.


Chris took advantage of the opportunity to *finally* see an arroyo in action. There are arroyos EVERYWHERE in Albuquerque, but they rarely--while we've been here--have had any water in them. Now, we have video proof of what a difference the arroyos make. It's on Facebook if you're interested, but here's a picture he took at the same time. Imagine all that on the roads instead.


If you look closely, you can get a sense of how quickly the water is moving.

I borrowed this from Facebook, too--this arroyo runs through our ward boundaries.


And the final Facebook contribution of the day, from Inhabitants of Burque: a shot of the arroyo running between freeway lanes. It's decidedly intense.


I've been trying to find statistics on how much rain was actually recorded in this particular storm, but I haven't found anything reliable to quote. I've read as little as .2 inches, as much as 1.9 inches in less than an hour. I don't know the numbers, but I know that it was crazy loud with the rain and hail falling on the van, and the roads were literally running with water. Scary drive home, and we only went a few blocks.

Good job, Albuquerque. You keep showing up with new cool things for me.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Britta!




1 comment:

Liz, Karl, Madison, Brooklyn, Aubrey and Zachary said...

That is crazy! Weird. Looks kind of exciting though.