Oh, yeah. Monsoon’s here.
I don’t know why, but they’re always bad when they come from the north and this one roared in. Hail, gale wind and rain so thick all the gullies decided to skip the whole ‘saturated ground’ thing and just run right now.
The Secret Lair’s location in a hollow between the ridge and the wash has the advantage of protecting me from most of the lightning and the disadvantage of being in the path of where a lot of water wants to go. My ditch directing water from the biggest gully behind the cabin was still semi-plugged with dirt pierced by a 4-inch pipe for normal drainage, because that’s the spot where the ditch crosses my sewage pipe to the septic tank and one does like a lot of dirt on top of that during winter. I say ‘was’ because the storm took removing that plug off my to-do list about five minutes after the gully started flowing. I watched from my window. That 4-inch pipe shot water like a fire hose and never did plug up with debris but so much water backed up behind it that it overtopped the plug which then lasted only a few seconds. It’s pretty weird, watching so much water flow through your yard that uprooted dead sage bushes are sailing past your window.
There’s an ash deposit in that gully which had a little mudslide leaving a nice new layer of the most glutenous and boot-clogging sort of mud we have (it comes in several varieties, and ash is my least favorite) in the vicinity of my dead garden but other than that and some loose items blown about there seems to have been no damage. The first bad one is always startling, though. At the height of the opening squall I couldn’t see the driveway. And we had rain and close lightning all the rest of the evening, so I just kept all the electronics unplugged.
How’d the new “balcony” do keeping water out of the window?
better, not perfect.
That described the storms that hit Sierra vista Friday night pretty well.
We’ve logged about 2.5″ in the last 10 days – not counting the slow and gentle rain from this eve – maybe another .25″. About 1.75″ of what we’ve had came in three one hour episodes – the type of rainfall that rolls right off the dirt and heads downstream. As a reference point – from the first of the year until 10 days ago we probably only had a 1/2 inch of rainfall.
Can’t argue with the 7-10′ drop in the daily high temps either.
Matt – I can see SV on the horizon from here. It looks dramatic enough at a distance when it’s all socked in with a thunderhead! Thanks for the fireworks back on the 4th – btw! I heard some unusual noises that night and went outside to see the cause and was reminded of the date by the sight of the end of a last salvo at a distance. From here the sound was just a low rumble – but not sustained enough to be thunder.