Gila Cliff Dwellings

Once Election Day was past, I took a ride to New Mexico. The first picture is a view from the ledge outside of the Gila Cliff Dwellings, looking toward the southwest (in the general direction of Tucson).

If there were a freeway straight from Tucson to Albuquerque it might take only about two hours to get from my house to this spot. Instead the actual drive takes almost five hours, ending with spectacular scenery along the way north from Silver City, NM. After arriving at the parking lot there is a one-mile trail that climbs up to and back down from the Cliff Dwellings. The first part of that loop-trail ascends alongside a creek through the canyon. The drive and the hike would be worthwhile even if there were no ancient structures to be seen.

The second picture is a view from inside the caves, also looking toward the southwest (the cave opening, if not over-exposed, would be a view of the ledge from the first picture). Three of the caves (caves 3, 4 and 5) are connected on the inside. There is a set of wooden steps at the entrance to cave 3. You can see in the picture the wooden railing along those steps. As an alternative entrance/exit, off to the left of the picture there is a wooden ladder that leans against the outside wall beneath cave 4.

On returning home that evening there was already a high wind warning in effect for Tucson. Anticipating high winds from the southwest at the Cliff Dwellings over the following days, I asked the ranger stationed in cave 3 about their impact. She commented only on the pleasant effects of cool breezes through the caves on summer days. Still I bet that sometimes high winds are channelled through the canyon, entering through the opening for cave 3 and exiting through the openings for caves 4 and 5. I imagine that part of the reason for the walls, for example the wall in the middle of this picture, was for protection from the wind. The wall in the middle happens to be special. As explained on the blue tablet that can be read while facing that wall, the wall displays a very faint remnant of a 700-year-old mural. According to the tablet, “Some modern Puebloan people who claim cultural affiliation with the Mogollon interpret similar designs to symbolize rain or clouds.” The tablet goes on to wonder, “Could this mural ... have been part of a plea to end the thirty year drought that swept the Southwest between 1270 and 1300 AD?” I can imagine someone huddled up against that wall for protection from the wind, hoping the wind would be followed by winter rain.

Let's hope this winter's storms bring abundant rain and snow to the Southwest. The outlook is for neutral-to-borderline-weak-El-Niño conditions, so a wet winter is not out of the question.

After the Deluge, July 15

Late Sunday afternoon my place got three and a quarter inches of rain. This picture was taken just two hours after the most intense rainfall rate I've ever seen. The pot-of-gold is a couple of miles away in Bob Maddox's driveway.

Chartiers Hill

Last month I was visiting in Pennsylvania, and my cousin was kind enough to show me the way to Chartiers Hill. I must have been on that road as a kid. Back then, on hot humid summer evenings, after the supper dishes were done our family would go for a ride in the station wagon. We would cruise around until sunset, up, down and around the hills and hollows near the Mon River, trying to catch a cool breeze. At least one of those explorations would have gone through Chartiers Hill. At that time I didn't realize that two decades before then Chartiers Hill had been struck by one of the most powerful, long-lived and deadly tornadoes on record in Pennsylvania.

The scene above is viewed from near the top of the hill, standing in what had been the school playground. The left half of the scene faces north while the right half faces northeast. The path of the June 23, 1944 storm was from northwest to southeast, so the tornado was traveling from left to right in the scene above. The area in the foreground escaped. But along the lower part of the main road, from the curve to above where the young man is riding an ATV, it was total destruction. The company store (general store) stood there. Rows of houses extended off of that part of the main road, one row on the left and two rows on the right.

Chartiers Hill is a bluff of land standing between hollows that are more than 200 feet deep. Castile Hollow lies off to the left of the picture. Ahead as well as off to the right is the valley of the South Fork of Ten Mile Creek. The South Fork curves 90 degrees around Chartiers Hill, just as the road ahead in the picture curves sharply to the left. The road drops down to Castile Hollow, then turns right to meet the South Fork. Aerial surveys just after the storm showed a nearly continuous 80-mile path extending between the West Virginia and the Maryland panhandles. Naturally, emphasis was on the individual segments of structural damage and deaths. On this segment the starting point for death and destruction was Castile Hollow.

I grew up in Hiller, about 7 or 8 miles northeast of Chartiers Hill. At the end of my earlier post, there is a link to recollections from 1944 about how debris lifted by the tornado fell in my old neighborhood. I commented that it was only after reading about that I appreciated what must have been the large-supercell nature of the storm. Though the storm was moving from northwest to southeast, the fuel for the storm, the warm moist air, was entering from the southwest, traveling from lower left to upper right in the picture above.

Emerald Street branches diagonally off of the main road, toward the southeast, roughly parallel to the path of the tornado. There is no outlet because the street ends before it reaches the steep hill down to the South Fork. Before the tornado there were about 16 houses on this street, eight on each side.

The house farthest away, near the end of Emerald Street, is the size of the pre-tornado houses. That house was relatively lucky. The tornado only took it's roof. Perhaps the proximity and orientation of the South Fork valley gave some respite at the very end from the intensity of the tornado. The original version of the house next door was where Eileen Sullenbarger grew up. I was fortunate to meet and talk with Eileen's son, Art. In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the tornado, Eileen's story of survival was reported in the Washington, Pa, Observer-Reporter. Looking at today's house, the outline of the original house can be seen in the wing that extends toward the street. From the other side, you can identify by the style of concrete block the part of the basement wall that stayed in place when Eileen's house was torn from its foundation.

When it comes to whether a storm might manage to produce a tornado, one of the key environmental parameters is high humidity. Southwest Pennsylvania and the adjacent parts of West Virginia and Maryland are often spared in the springtime; the dewpoint never quite gets high enough. But the summer can be a different story. There's less of a need in summer to transport moisture rapidly north from the Gulf of Mexico; often the high humidity has been in place for several days. Fortunately, having all of the other ingredients come together, as they did in 1944, is relatively rare. Today's Storm Prediction Center does a great job of anticipating the possibilities. Let's hope the threats continue to be rare.

November through March

Safe to say that we won't be getting any more rain in Tucson this month. That means that the total at the Tucson airport for these five winter months, November through March, will be 3.48 inches, which is about 4.5 times the total for the same period last year, and just a little below the average for those five months over the last 60 years. I had about an inch more than the airport. That plus the fact that we did not have a late freeze is making the plants look much better this year. In my previous post, I had suggested that there were two winters, 1974-1975 and 1999-2000, that would serve as good analogues for this past winter in Tucson. In fact this past winter's rainfall was much better than those earlier second-year-of-La-Niña-in-a-row winters.

Since chatter about La Niña has ceased, it might come as a surprise to learn that those conditions are still in place, although weakening. March will probably be close to the end for La Niña, so the ocean temperature anomaly will have averaged about -0.75 C over the five-month winter period. For much of the rest of the country, the last two winters, both La Niñas, have been about as far apart as winters can get. So much for a repeat of last winter.