Chiricahua Storm

Storm over the Chiricahua Mountains viewed from the New Mexico Bootheel.

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Southern New Mexico has been in drought since we moved from Wyoming over two years ago. In normal years, the Arizona monsoon brings summer storms, blocking the sun and cooling temperatures. Even then, this is a sunny place, so it's exciting when rains come as they have over the last few days thanks to two low-pressure systems that swept from the California coast across the Southwest and then into the Plains. After rain, locals check their rain gauges and send texts to each other. It can feel almost competitive.

“How much did you get??” 

“We got 0.7 inches. How about you?” 

The sunshine is nothing to complain about, especially for those of us who love the arid West. For most of us, sunny skies and expansive vistas beat the dreary gray and oppressive undergrowth of more humid places. 

Photographically, startling clear blue skies are less interesting than dramatic storms or even well-spaced summer cumuli, so I was excited last weekend while driving home from visiting friends in Bisbee, Arizona when a storm engulfed the Chiricahua Mountains of Southern Arizona. By then, we were in New Mexico’s bootheel, looking west at the mountains where the sun poked through the clouds just enough to highlight a few places in the landscape. It was spectacular, and I stopped to shoot a few photos over the barbed wire fence beside the highway. 

Roadside view. 

The big picture.

Moody version of the storm

Hurricane Sandy

Boathouse and dock, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, before Hurricane Isabel

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In 2003, Hurricane Isabel flooded my parent's house on the Chesapeake Bay in Southern Virginia and washed away the dock and boathouse pictured above.  Consequently, whenever hurricanes threaten the East Coast, I obsessively track the weather and tide websites to try to assess if they are going to have to go through that again.  It looks like they dodged the bullet on this one, though there is one more high tide this morning before the surge from Sandy stops contributing.  

Ellen's sister and her family live in Rumson, New Jersey, which is a little north of Sandy's predicted landfall.  They are threatened by massive storm surge and higher winds than my parents will experience.  Their house is high off the water (30-40') and a little inland, so they should be safe from the surge, but I'm sure the area will suffer, power will be lost, and trees will come down.

Here's wishing everyone well in the path of this storm.

Keanesburg, NJ

Monmouth, NJ

Manhattan looks like a watery place when viewed from NJ.

Bei and her cousins enjoying a gentler summer breeze in 2010 on the Jersey shore.

Unable to Resist the Aspens

                                            Fall, Happy Jack Road, Wyoming

Like millions of other photographers, when fall comes I'm unable to resist the color, even though I know that every conceivable photograph of Rocky Mountain aspen trees has already been taken, often by  more patient landscape photographers than I (an aside -- did you see the discouraging news piece about an art installation that filled several rooms of a gallery with small prints of every single image uploaded to flickr in a 24-hour period?).  Still, it's beautiful out for those fleeting few weeks, and those of us that live in the Northern Rockies know that when that color is gone, we face a black and white world of wind, blowing snow, and cold fingers for 6-7 months, depending on the year.  So out we go, just to enjoy it while it lasts.  The image above is from one such outing, and a passing thunderstorm set off the landscape for me.  It's nice when the sky cooperates by filling itself with something other than crystal blue skies.

Photo information:  Nikon D700, 28mm lens, ISO 400, 1/160 handheld, f16