further afield than usual
Posted by Zonie on September 03, 2023 at 04:27:50
As I suspected would be the case, the southeast monsoon has been very weak. Hurricane Hillary was a dud. We got only 0.04" of rain. Then we settled into the old weather pattern but there was a strange prediction. Monday afternoon the temperature reached 117°F, but the long-range forecast was that Saturday the temperature would reach only 97°F. One of my co-workers said a temperature drop that rapid would be unusual. I said, "Consider it the first cold snap of the autumn."
In addition to this thunderstorms were in the forecast for Thursday and Friday. We did indeed have a thunderstorm Thursday night, but it provided the main recording gage a mere 0.07" of rain. I looked over the NWS website of the automated rain gages. My usual haunts, Reach 11, and the Pinnacle Peak Road state trust land, had only about 0.35" Some areas further north showed much higher readings. The gage at 16th Street and Cloud Road on unincorporated land about a mile north of the Phoenix city limits registered 2.35". That certainly sounded promising. It was a couple miles west of the rodeo I tried to attend in March that was sold out. I checked the State Land Department map and found there was indeed state trust land right by that gage. It was a bit of a long drive, about 45 minutes, but it had been so long I thought it worthwhile. I drove out there and arrived just after 9:30 this morning.
On the one hand the land had fewer features than the tract I'm used to hiking. On the other hand, there was no evidence of the massive dumping that occurs between Pinnacle Peak and Dynamite Roads. The only litter I saw were a few shotgun shells.
I started north of Cloud Road but saw only a few small puddles and crossed south into the other parcel. For a while there was only a little mud, but I found a ditch near 16th Street in a mesquite and palo verde thicket. After some exploration I found a puddle in the ditch with deep mud under it. I churned it up with my jungle boots, got down and had a good wallow. The ditch was partly shaded, and the mud was still cool and refreshing. I churned it until it was very sticky and thick. I heard traffic from the nearby road, but nobody from the road could see into the thicket. I switched positions and wanted to wallow again. Indeed when I physically tried to rise it wasn't all that difficult despite the weight of the thick mud on my overalls, but psychologically it was hard to motivate myself to leave. I reasoned with myself, "It feels cool now, but the sun is heating everything, and if you try to stay all day you'll be a heat casualty."
When I got up into the open country and the breeze, evaporative cooling made me feel a bit better, and I did some more exploring. I headed south to Carefree Highway and followed a trail in a slightly different direction, northeast instead of due north.
The mud was quickly drying and falling off in clumps, and although I was dirty I no longer felt weighed down. Then I saw an arroyo with a relatively clean puddle. I used my hat to repeatedly splash myself from it, and this relieved the heat for a while. I then continued and eventually found Cloud Road again and my car. The clock in my car said I'd been away for 4½ hours.
I drove home, hosed down and mowed the lawn. At that point I was quite exhausted, and I went for a brief swim and then indoors for a shower and the laundry. It had been a long time since my last mud wallow. Well a rainy winter is expected, so things are looking up.