Rain in the Desert
3 Comments Published August 26th, 2007 in Southern Utah Places, Southern Utah Wildlife and Nature.The remains of Hurricane Dean arrived in Zion Park at precisely 3:45 in the afternoon today.
There’s something beautiful and terrible about rain in the canyon. Thunder echoes from side to side on the cliffs. I’ve seen a bolt of lightning explode against the West Temple as though Thor himself threw it. Every storm is different. This one started with huge drops of rain that splashed five inches high in the water dish I keep outside for the squirrels.
At the height of the storm, I pace from window to window just to watch the fury of the storm. My satellite Internet connection is dead now anyway. I’ve built dozens of little rock dams all over my property and I love to see the small reservoirs fill up behind them. My idea is that if a drop of rain falls on my hill, I want it to stay on my hill. Some of them are silting up into nice flat sand beds now.
After the rain is over, you can look up canyon and see magnificent waterfalls plunging over the sides of cliffs. Surprise Wash below the house always floods and you can hear the water roaring down to join the Virgin River. And the rain always makes the Yucca and Brigham Tea plants shine against the background of blackbrush. The aroma of the wet desert is like nothing else.
But the Internet is back up again now. Back to work!
Dan,
It’s been almost a yr since this storm. Do you get big storms very often?
I enjoy the idea that you have created dams to transform your property and created a bit of what nature provides in the larger area above you.
Your description of the storm and the after affects helps me imagine just how great it must be to live and experience this in person! The picture you included is magnificent, and only helps the imagination that much more!
“Do you get big storms very often?”
Actually, no. That was the most recent time when we had a really good rain like that right here at my house.
Rain is very local here. Last week, we drove through a rain just ten miles down the road that was so violent that I saw cars pull off the road rather than continue through it. (But I don’t have that kind of good sense so we kept going.) When we arrived at my house, it was only raining lightly.
That’s why flash floods are such a problem. When it rains, it can fill up a slot canyon with a fifty feet of water in just a few minutes. Anything in the canyon – trees, boulders, people – will be washed out in a violent surge. But it might only happen once every ten years.