Ah, it’s happening again… The mountains aren’t visible at all. When the clouds lift, there will be snow all around us, just not at our altitude for now.
Yesterday afternoon at around 4:30 p.m. a storm blew in that was notably ferocious. The wind was horrific, surely gusting to 50-60 mph. The backyard patio table and umbrella blew over. The chairs out front went tumbling. (For some reason, this time my heavy aluminum extension ladder propped up against the house outside the kitchen didn’t come crashing down like it usually does.) I hadn’t put the cap back on the stovepipe since the last time it blew off, so no problem there, hah! And then of course, it rained hard for a couple of hours, which means abundant greasy mud. Right now, this morning, it’s 30 degrees colder than the same time 24 hours ago.
Catching ahold of our mood is the biggest task when this happens. Summers in northern New Mexico are something of a joke, a tease, a hint of what might happen somewhere else, so when the season shifts and shirt-sleeve weather blows away in a cloud of dust and flying gravel, everything we didn’t get done yet can bear heavy on the heart. Can’t let that happen.
When the sun comes out — it always does — I’ll have pictures of the snow I know is up there, just not visible yet behind the low-lying clouds that turn the high desert into Indianapolis without the traffic. Always beautiful and dramatic, oh yeah.
Just a month or two too soon!
UPDATE: I just added the image at the top of this post. That’s a view of snow falling along the Hondo-Seco Road north of Taos. Lobo Peak is only barely visible behind the precipitation.
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Tell me about it. Our beautiful fall leaves didn’t even last long enough for me to get pictures this year. Now, we have snow. I can’t see the ridge across the canyon – they top out at 13,000′. There was less than an inch on the ground when I came to work this morning but it hasn’t stopped. It’s too warm to stick so the resort can’t make snow to add to the natural. It’s a month too soon!!!
Hard slogging here. I’m going over old columns written when my wife was in Dubuque. That plus the stupid clouds, precip, and it being so cold I just had to build a fire are gonna drive me to self-administered sedation shortly.
I can see a little bit of the lower slopes of Taos Mountain now. Snow! I think we missed the snow line at our muddy rented adobe by about 300 feet…