The Dramatic Skies of Arizona

The skies of Arizona, brooding, violent, turbulent skies, yet blithe and placid. Changeable skies. Unpredictable. Now angry, now serene, they have many moods, though always there is drama in the skies of Arizona. Storied skies. Dramatic skies for a dramatic country.

Lift your eyes as others have these long years since man first came upon this place we call Arizona. Hohokam. Anasazi. Mogollon. The old ones. Lift your eyes as did those who share the Piman tongue; and too, the Navajo and their Apache cousins. And the Hopi, whose high, windswept mesalands of the north country are within view of the majestic San Francisco Peaks, where dwell the kachinas. Lift your eyes as did the Spaniard, who came in the name of God and king, in quest of fabled riches, never found. And look to the skies as did the Mexican who let his roots grow deep into this hard, parched soil; and yes, even as did those who came later, out of the east, from places whose alien names fall harshly upon Indian and Spanish ears. Lift your eyes unto the heavens, as did those who came before; lift them to the dramatic skies of Arizona. But allow your gaze to linger, if only for a moment, to consider the Arizona

horizon... where earth ends and sky begins. A ragged edge of mountaintop, perhaps... a forest of towering pines a lonely stretch of desert sands a barren mesa .. a spire of sandstone a spiked stand of saguaro with upraised arms. And when you have seen this, lift your eyes then to the drama in shafts of rain that angle from the bases of distant cloud formations. The late afternoon sun breaks suddenly through a thickness of storm clouds and a dazzling rainbow arcs from on high, its fabled "end" hidden beyond a far thicket of piñon. A lone, vagrant cloud, puffy and brilliant white, scuds high across a summer sky that is all the deeper, all the bluer, because of the desert's low humidity and its low pollution levels. Lift your eyes to a nighttime sky crazed by incessant, malevolent strokes of lightning, and cup your hands over ears, against the shattering, crashing claps of thunder. The skies of Arizona. Awesome. Dramatic.

Arizona's dramatic skies are at their splendiferous best at sunset. Left to right: a cloud shadow produces an eerie phenomenon in the evening sky.

Dark silhouettes of the Coconino National Forest contrast with the delicate pastel colors of an evening sky. George McCullough/Carlos Elmer/Josef Muench (Following panel, pages 30-31) The Mittens at moonrise. Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. David Muench

BIRTH OF A STORM

Meteorologist John H. Tenharkel of the National Weather Service photographed this growth sequence of a cumulonimbus cloud while driving north of Flagstaff.

In the first photo, the cloud has begun to form over the San Francisco Peaks. The warm air near the ground bulges upwards to produce the puffy skygalleon. (The Latin term cumulus means "heaped.") The flat base marks the level at which invisible water vapor becomes fine water droplets. (It is a visual dewpoint.) In photo two, taken approximately one hour later, the peace-loving cumulus has become an overzealous giant, turning itself into a cumulonimbus (nimbus violent rain) with its typical vertical development. Massive clouds like this could contain violent ingredients such as: tempest winds, heavy rain, pelting hail, or lightning, all being churned up by updrafts that could lift the cloud top to 10 or 12 miles and downdrafts that can exceed 200 miles per hour.In its late stage, photo 3, the cumulonimbus has soared to the upper reaches of the sky. Vertical development has stopped and high altitude winds have caught the top of the cloud and reshaped it into a huge anvil. Within and without, the cloud is a giant electrical generator capable of producing a charge that may exceed 100 million volts.

From high above, thunder voices a promise of rains to quench these thirsting lands, and the Navajo medicine man intones an ancient chant: The voice that beautifies the land! The voice above, The voice of the thunder. Within the dark cloud Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land . . .

Now lift your eyes as fleecy, billowy cumulus clouds form on a summer afternoon, and gather and build and all but fill the sky. Watch as the clouds heave and churn angrily and darken as high altitude winds shape anvil tops across the clouds' loftiest reaches. Lightning slashes the heavens, playing to a deafening accompaniment of thunder. Suddenly the wind sweeps down across the land, bearing the rain's first drops. The very skies seem to open then, and the heavy rains pour forth. But in minutes the thundershower - a fleeting thing - is done. The clouds move on to keep yet another rendezvous, and the sun returns. Dramatic skies, Arizona skies. An outsized moon, lopsided and the color of palest pumpkin, heaves suddenly and unexpectedly into sight, rising beyond distant mountain peak silhouettes. Far across the valley a dust devil skitters along the desert floor in the heat of a summer afternoon, its whirling column of earth's debris reaching skyward.... In times past such dust devils - remolinos de tierra - were charged with danger, with evil, or so legend has it. And were one so luckless as to be singled out by such a desert whirlwind, it was well to act with haste, a folklorist will say. She tells of the faithful raising trembling hands toward the nearing, swirling shaft of dust, and quickly crossing index fingers behind upraised thumbs in the sign of the cross. And then, says the folklorist, a certain prayer was to be spoken to further ward off evil.

Ave Maria, purisima, the prayer began. Que se vaya el diablo y que venga Dios. "Hail Mary, most pure. May the devil go away and may God come." But now morning mist rises from the still waters of a lake in Arizona's high country, glowing with the rare quality of the new day's first golden light . . . Lift your eyes to the sun, ringed by a corona. And lift them too, to the lacy, fragile cirrus clouds high above, and to stratus clouds, slate gray,

somber, foreboding, and seemingly low enough to touch with outstretched fingertips.

Dramatic, these Arizona heavens. And splendid.

Of course nothing happens in them that doesn't happen in skies everywhere. It's simply that Arizona has so much more sky for it to happen in, than do most other places.

More sky? Well, not exactly, but. . . . A scientist shrugs, squints slightly and permits a suggestion of smile to play upon his lips as he speaks of a cloud base that tends to be higher above the earth over Arizona, than it is over most other places.

Why? Low humidity, says the scientist, nodding his head. Low humidity, coupled with high elevations. By way of example he cites Tucson, with an elevation of about 2500 feet. Overhead the summer cloud base might be at an altitude of perhaps 10,000 feet, or some 7500 feet above the floor of Santa Cruz Valley.

Which means the view of Arizona skies is not as obscured as might be the view of the skies in many other places, the scientist goes on. The comparative absence of pollution in Arizona skies makes the atmosphere more transparent, increasing visibility, making it possible to see farther than one is likely to see in other places.

Big skies then, these storied, dramatic skies of Arizona. And surely no occurrence more dramatic than the setting sun can unfold in these spacious heavens. A spectacular sunset that is "Day is done, gone the sun..." and it's a classically perfect spring night. A full moon beams down on the desert which is fragrant with the blossoms of wild flowers, cactus, and the Lord's Candle, the Yucca."... all is well, safely rest, God is nigh."

Ablaze with splashy, deep-toned hues, for instance, with rippling heights and stacked-up clouds arranged just so for the occasion; a symphonic color extravaganza, if you will, orchestrated for Kodachrome. Drama? It goes without saying.

There is drama too, in an ordinary Arizona sunset, if indeed, any setting of Arizona's sun may be called "ordinary." Viewed from a patio, it is a sun-set that comes of a warm evening in springtime.

Nothing spectacular. So yes, call it "ordinary." Simply the sun dropping routinely behind western mountains at the close of a desert day. Of clouds there are few. A whispy chain of them, brushed low across the ragged western horizon. The sky is drab, washed out, and already the sun has slipped from sight. A hard yellow glow tarnishes the soft blue expanse and there is a near-greening of the sky.

A dog barks, traffic rumbles along a distant highway, children laugh in their after-supper games. Even with such familiar sounds, the evening's sunset time is cloaked by a certain stillness. High overhead, far beyond man's hearing, a speck that is a jet airplane etches a stark white scratch across the sky. Upon distant mountains, purple shadows run together, turn gray, and deepen finally, to silhouette-black. At once the sky brightens near the horizon as the palest of oranges and pinks rinse away the metallic green. The changes are subtle. Slowly the pink-orange tones intensify. The spare low clouds sip of the color and hold it, savor it, for a time, as even the jet's contrail fills with glowing orange.

The patio's paloverde trees, the saguaro sentinel and the gracefulocotillo beyond the wall are pat-terns sketched in black ink upon a backdrop of pastel sky. But the clouds are too thin, too meager, to contain the color of the dying day for more than precious moments, and they pale quickly as the orange and the pink drain from the sky.

Night comes fast as the sky darkens.

There is a gentle stirring of the day's last breeze; the single sounding note of the wind bell, a rustling of leaves and then . . . quiet. At the vine's delicate yellow blossoms, hummingbird moths hover, darting insects loop not far away. A night bird cuts an arrow's course through gathering dusk.

Across the valley lights are blinking on.

Night has come, the sun is down. A desert day has ended and there is a suggestion of chill in the air. The sky deepens and the mountains meld into the overturned teacup of night.

But wait - lift your eyes once more before you sleep; lift them unto the Arizona heavens and they will see dim stars puncture the soft blackness overhead, as saw the eyes of the old ones in those times so long past. . . .

Author's note: Thanks to Dr. Louis J. Battan, director of the University of Arizona's Institute of Atmospheric Physics; and to Dr. Frances Gillmor, folklorist and, until her retirement, long a member of the University of Arizona English faculty, and author of many distinguished works on the Southwest and Mexico.