Southwest of La Junta, the High Plains gets quite lofty and desiccated indeed, only green in some years due to the sort of unusually wet winter and spring it had. This is, for most folks, the middle of nowhere, foreboding and forbidding. Yet this landscape draws me out magnetically, appreciatively, immersively, as on this evening where a strangely composed sky texture unfolded then folded again, over a span of unknown minutes that I didn’t count. Peripheral, filtered sunset light sneaked around the northeast rim of a mostly hidden supercell that was outflow-dominant, partly elevated, yet there as sure as its tiers above the shelf cloud and its dense hail core on radar echoes. I once had a dream of being terminally ill but standing next to my wife, at the end of what I knew would be my last-ever storm chase, closing out a season on a high spot in this part of Colorado, with the same sort of landscape extending to the northern horizon, the skies getting murky, the daylight fading, our realization stark and sobering of an ending in and of life. Fortunately, the worst aspect of that dream was not true, and in reality, I lived to chase the very next day. Still, the memory struck hauntingly, while out here alone in “nowhere”, where the land and sky make any man and his dreams seem small, fleeting and inconsequential in the face of their immensity.
2 SW Timpas CO (7 Jul 23) Looking SW
37.7863, -103.8119