July 26 2009 The far reaches of the land

Our trip to the mountains was shortened in such a way as to chop out the part with the mountains. Instead, we drove through some incredible rain. It's the desert, and it's raining, and there are flash floods in the washes, miniature muddy rivers swarming down the sides of the canyons into the river, which was its typical low level and determined to be lazy despite the extra water. The sky kept reaching its long electrical fingers into the valley, but I couldn't catch it on camera. Water puddled on the road. Desert drivers pulled over until they could figure out how to work the windshield wipers, or cursed their off-road tires unfit for wet pavement, or more likely cursed the rain for rendering their rig useless.

I normally get a sense of clausterphobia driving through these mountains, having grown up in Missouri where hill upon hill is backdropped by hill and the sky reaches out forever. Here the mountains channel activity through a course and looking north and south only sees striped canyons pointing the way down river. The layers upon layers of cliffs look like a flat photograph with no depth but ragged top edges, except today, when the sky came down in an armament of clouds coursing through all the valleys and changing the color of the farther away mountains to a dark blue, and as they get closer, a grey, until the ones just on the other side of the river and railroad tracks are striped black and yellow and red, like usual. Colorado is bigger in the rain.



Photo taken on Landscape setting with the repeating shutter turned on. It has a name, says the photographer, taking several photos with one shutter release press, but I don't remember what it is. It didn't work anyway. No lightning shots.

Tomorrow's Noun of the Day: opening