And a little earlier, I zoomed-in to a section with my 100-400 lens with the 1.4x teleconverter added --
A harbinger of things to come...Then while THIS was going on to the east, I glanced over to the west and Cave Creek Canyon -- and I saw a HUGE rainbow that dwarfed the canyon; it was so big, in fact, that I couldn't get the entire span in one shot, but as it was disappearing rapidly I took what I could get --
The "pot of gold" on the left is right on Cathedral Rock. The rainbow was about as ephemeral as a rainbow can be, lasting only about a minute at most after this. Then things started to cloud up; here's Cave Creek Canyon once again, set against a blue-tinted sky of clouds --
Friends said that cloud in the center looked like (a) a fish, (b) an airship, or my favorite (c) a big hand, pointing off to the left. And after it was, er, pointed out to me, I could see it, too -- a thumb with the 2nd finger pointing, sort of looking like one of those giant hands that Terry Gilliam made for the cartoons used on the Monty Python shows. About 10am, the rain started in earnest, not raining hard but enough to give my Desert Willow tree that I'd planted the day before the good soaking it needed. Then a Facebook friend said there were thunderstorms coming my way, so I sat out on a protected and dry part of the back porch with my camera and remote shutter and played with the settings. Getting lightning shots during daytime is very tricky, as it's easy to overexpose; the settings have to be just SO. Well, I never got them to be just SO, which is just as well as the thunder and lightning show never showed up. While I was sitting out back my neighbor Bob came from around the front; he wanted to know if he could park his small Kia car in my driveway. Nearly a year to the day Hurricane Odile caused Cave Creek, crossing Foothills Road, to be impassable -- and Bob's house was on the other side; he was trapped for nearly a week. So this time he wanted to leave a car on the other side of the creek, so he'd be able to get out to the paved Portal Road. I said "of course!" so now his car sits at the side of Faranuf. But the anticipated heavy rain never happened, though it was a steady rain. The hummingbirds were going nuts at the feeders hanging at the sides of the back porch roof, but the little guys were getting wet, so I put the big feeder with 10 ports on a hook in a protected area of the porch roof -- and hoped they would see the change in feeder location. It took them a few minutes -- but eventually they did, and all the ports were taken by the hummingbirds, who were now dry when they were drinking the nectar. I'd like to think they were grateful... The entire day was pretty much a solid overcast; you couldn't see the Peloncillos to the east, and they were only about 15 miles away at most. Cave Creek Canyon to the west had disappeared, too. Then, at around 5pm, the clouds lifted, and the mountains reappeared. To the east, the Peloncillos and a partial rainbow ---
And to the west, Cave Creek Canyon, with shafts of sunlight on the canyon walls, while dark clouds still loomed over the scene --
As the saying goes -- truly epic. Today's forecast is for thunderstorms starting around 11am, which should give me a weather window for heading down to Douglas, 55 miles to the south. It's grocery time, and visiting a hardware store for, among other things, mulch and fertilizer for Desert Willow and any future plantings I might have in mind. Highway 80 is the only way to get to Douglas from Portal, and it has some low spots, so it might be an "adventure". But Tundra Dos is a high-clearance, 4-wheel-drive truck, so I should be ok. But it will just be another memorable day (hopefully in a good way) in Life At Faranuf.
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