The storm that was headed our way last evening, click for full size!
© R. Ford, all rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
The storm that was headed our way last evening, click for full size!
© R. Ford, all rights reserved.
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These are beautiful.
How little we are in the face of Weather.
Seeing clouds like that just makes me want to drop everything and paint them. Beautiful shots.
Rick got these yesterday coming home from town. Pulled off at Sweetbriar to get his phone out and click away. Right about the same time, I had wandered into the kitchen, looked out the window, said to myself “huh, no clouds.” Then the thunder grumbled, so I went out on the back deck, and looked the other way. Then I saw what Rick was shooting.
Well I know what the northwind brought you here -- thunder AND a song. :)
Thanks, rq and kestrel!
That storm passed mostly to the south of us, but it was a nasty one. The black reaching down to the ground means heavy rain, and a lot of times, hail.
It had me worried while driving home. These pictures are from about 30 miles away.
Storms like that are interesting to watch, from a point of safety. I remember once travelling northwards when a ‘wall of death” storm studded with multiple lightning strikes rapidly approached from the west. Stop or flee, I thought. Wound the old wagon up to 90mph to get out from the storm’s path and arrived at our friends place just after the power went out. The next day I went south again to find ten big power poles pretzelled to the ground and crews working to rebuild. Some days fleeing is the best option.
Lofty,
I’ve been caught in the “wall of death” storms. Once while fishing from my canoe in a small lake. all I had time for was to go to shore, flip my canoe upside down, prop it up with my paddle, and crawl underneath. Heavy rain and kidney bean size hail came, but I was fine. A canoe makes a fine roof!
After that, I check horizons constantly, without even thinking about it. I saw this storm from 60 miles away, and knew it was getting close to home, so stopped and took pictures from a safe place.
Dramatic skies captured. The last is the most intense.
The open grassland feels a bit alien for me. Having lived my whole life in a heavily forested country, it’s a bit strange not to see the open land delimited by wooded ridges. I can see the beauty, it’s just different.
Ice Swimmer
If you ever get the chance to visit (drive across) a prairie or other flat grassland, it’s quite the experience. I grew up in Ontario, which is forest and farmland and a lot of giant rocks and cliffs, but I remember Saskatchewan (there’s the old joke about watching your dog run away for three weeks), and it’s just… so much space. A lot of it, on all sides (though I suppose if you’ve lived near the ocean it’s not quite as frighteningly flat). Latvia’s a bit different, in that it’s a lot flatter, far less rockier, and you do get areas with wide open spaces and low, rolling hills (and yes, dramatic storms, too!), but somehow it’s not quite as expansively impressive as what I remember of Saskatchewan. Maybe it’s the mental size comparison of Canada vs. Latvia, or it’s because I was a lot smaller, but still -- as big as the sky gets here, I’d never really call Latvia big sky country.
rq @ 9
I’ll try to remember this if I get in a situation in which traveling is feasible.
Here in Finland, the coastline is full of peninsulas and bays and there is often an archipelago by the coast. So one has to go to outer islands or places such as Kalajoki to see open sea. The lakes also have quite complicated coastlines and a lot of islands.
In Finland, in the provinces of Häme (Tavastia) and Uusimaa, where I’ve mostly lived, there are gently rolling hills and farmland (mostly land that was longer underwater after the Ice Age) is seemingly surrounded by forests (on former islands and peninsulas). In parts of Satakunta and especially in Pohjanmaa, it’s very very flat, but the forests are still there, around the farmland.