quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

I finally caught this!
Of course you can't make it out for jackshit, but it's there nonetheless. Try the clickie for biggie and see what you can see.

I am headed south-I almost wrote driving south, but credit me for having the sense to pull over to the side of the road before I dick with the camera-anyway, headed south, shooting this facing towards the east. That odd haystack cloud formation, looping up over the mountain there? That is a rainstorm being blown up, over and south by a freak northeast wind down the Fraser Valley. Were there no wind, that rain would be falling in Canada, around Yarrow. As it is it's blowing up and over, and coming down around the bottom of Reese Hill. Which is that hill in the picture there.
Here's what you're supposed to be seeing:













Here's another view of it. I've traveled another quarter mile headed south. Once again, facing east:



What happens is this: that mountain, hill, whatever you call it, is a spur of the Cascade foothills that nips into the northeast flow of the Fraser Valley and creates something like a backwash, or a venturi effect. ( I don't know what that would be in meteorological terms.) When the northeast wind veers just right, you get amazing cloud formations and standing weather patterns, like huge monster thunderstorms that lay trapped up against the northern face of that spur and stay there for hours, firing off lightning like a Frankenstein movie. Or backwards-arching rainstorms.


I could be totally full of shit, too.










I don't hear National Geographics photography department beating down my door either.
Oh well.
To me, stuff like this is cool. I grew up in a place where there was only two kinds of weather-shitty, humid and hot, or shitty, humid and cold. To me, this is BIG weather. Of course, according to people from the Midwest, this is sad, tiny weather, I know, but I like it.