Last Tuesday night, I sat in a lecture hall over at University of Arizona listening to an interesting talk on photography. Out of courtesy, I turned my phone set on “Do Not Disturb” mode before the lecture began. All of a sudden, my phone and several others in the room started emitting that terrible emergency warning screech. Scared me, that’s for sure. I pull it out of my pocket and it’s a blizzard warning for the greater Tucson area. What?
Now that was a bit strange as I spent most of this very day in shorts. But, it was a foreshadow of things to come. Still, getting a blizzard warning for Tucson is a bit unnerving.
The next day, it started raining…then around 2:00 PM it started snowing…yes I said snowing, here in the desert. It didn’t stick and eventually it stopped. But after the sun went down, it started raining first, then turned to snow…not little tiny snow flakes…no, these were big mothers just like I used to experience in WA. And, they started sticking.
According to the news, it was snowing everywhere in the Tucson area. They were closing roads into the mountains (Tucson is surrounded by mountains). The PGA golf tour happened to be here this weekend and they had to shut down play as the course became completely covered in snow. I saw two major golfers on the tour throwing snowballs at each other. What a day!
Of course, I saw this as a major opportunity to go out and take some photos. So I was up before sunrise…and after a quick scouting trip around my area, I realized most of the snow here had melted. So, I headed for a little higher elevation.
Gates Pass sits above Tucson and is only a couple of miles from my home. So I headed up there and quickly found a lot of snow still on the ground and on the cacti. So I started shooting as soon as there was enough light.
This was one of my first shots, looking down on the city of Tucson at sunrise. You can barely make out some of the snow on the nearby cactus. Off in the distance past the city lights, you can make out the Santa Catalina Mountains on the left and the Rincon Mountains on the right. As you can see, the snow comes all the way down to the city.
From what I’ve learned, snow in Tucson happens about once every ten years. So, you can probably guess we don’t have many snow plows and you can’t find any snow shovels in the hardware stores. So we just had to sit this one out in front of a warm fire (oops, we don’t have fireplaces either) and wait for it all to melt.
In all fairness, we do get snow every year high in the mountains (there is a ski resort up on Mt. Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains) but it does not normally come down this far. It’s the first time I’ve seen it in the four years I lived here.
It was quite an exciting 24 hours, to be sure…but we are back to normal and by Thursday we should be in the low 70’s again. But, it was quite an experience for us desert rats and I will have more shots from this extraordinary day in the near future.
(To see a larger version of this photo, just click on the image)
To see more of my work, both in photography and digital painting, please visit my website, www.corkrum.com
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