Gone Coastal

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Can I paint you a picture?

Vegas sits in the middle of a low flat valley. To the west, and a little bit north, is Mount Charleston, and a long low finger of a ridge stretches south.
It's been windy since I've been here, and I might have mentioned to some of you that it's a bit dry. In fact there's been a bit of a drought, and even the famous fountains are flowing rather with much less flash. In the early evening, there were dark clouds breaking up the blue sky. Someone around here's gonna get some rain, I thought, and that's probably a good thing. I was driving down to the outlet center to find a place to eat.
When I came out after supper, the sun was just setting, and most of the sky had cleared again. As I pulled out of the lot and turned west to cross over the freeway, I saw what remained of the earlier menace.
Ahead, running the length of that mountain ridge, was a line of rain clouds, still emptying. A thick dark line divided the darkening blue sky. Below it, the virga hung and just brushed the top of the ridge's silhouette, backlit by the last of the sun's rays.
I didn't have a camera, and in any case I was driving. For a moment I wished I could snap that shot, capture it, but I wouldn't have done it justice in a frame.

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