Amazing sights

Too bad it was too dark to take pictures.

We've had some wild weather lately. Lots of wind and rain. Sometimes very heavy rain. It rained almost almost all night last night. It rained off and on all day today. Around noon, the wind started blowing. It's been blowing like it does during a monsoon storm, except that it just keeps blowing. When I left work, it was raining. The wind was blowing my truck and other vehicles back and forth across the freeway. My house is about 20 miles from where I work. It stopped raining when I was about halfway home. The sky up ahead looked strange. It was fuzzy as if blurred by rain, but it was the wrong color. It wasn't gray like rain. It was tan, like ... dust!

We must have had at least a couple of inches of rain by then. Everything was saturated. It was dust, though. As I drove through it, it sprinkled now and then. The raindrops left dusty spots as they dried. Maybe it blew in from Mexico.

The freeway has some of those update-able traffic information signs. One of them said that Apache Trail was closed at Tortilla Flat. I figured it must be because Tortilla Creek was over the road. I decided to drive out there and see.

It was getting kind of dark by the time I got out to Canyon Lake. Just past the second one lane bridge, there are some cliffs to the left. I've known for a long time that there are sometimes waterfalls there because of the black streaks they leave on the rock. Before today, though, I had never seen the water.

One of the smaller waterfalls. Sorry about the poor quality. It was dark.

The waterfalls were doing strange stuff today. Remember the wind? It was blowing the water back up over the cliffs.

Waterfall being blown back up the cliff. It was a long exposure, so the spray doesn't show up much.

It was getting very dark by the time I got to Tortilla Flat. The shortest exposure I got was 4 seconds. I couldn't get the camera focused; I just set it to infinity. The creek was a roaring torrent.

Tortilla Creek. That's a lot of water.

Tortilla Flat. I was the only one there.

If anybody has any suggestions on how to focus in the dark, please let me know.

2010_01_21