July and August are notorious for thunderstorms in Arizona. We have a Monsoon weather pattern that brings moisture up from the Sea of Cortez and dumps it all over the state. It makes for interesting hiking all over the state including the Grand Canyon.
I just got out of the canyon on Sunday and I want to share some photos of a storm we saw on Friday afternoon. We were hanging at Plateau Point,which is deep in the canyon over three thousand feet below the rim, when we saw a thunderstorm brewing about 5 miles to the east.
So here we are , the tallest objects in the area so of course we were checking to make sure that we weren’t going to end up as lightning rods. But that’s the beauty of the canyon, it is so large that you can watch a storm in one part of the canyon while you remain dry. While we were watching mother nature’s light show, I snapped a few shots of the storm.
This first shot shows rain coming in over the South Rim and into Pipe Creek Canyon. The lightning was much further to the east so we decided to stay put unless the lightning was moving closer. We were actually hoping to get rained on; it was 100 degrees at Indian Gardens and we wanted to get cooled off.
The rain is moving closer to us at this point and is about a mile and a half away and the nasty stuff was still so far away that we decided to stay put and enjoy the shower.
We got hit with a light shower while the bulk of the rain was still moving over Cremation Canyon. It was just enough to cool us down without soaking us. You couldn’t ask for anything better.
After the shower passed, we stared back up at the South Rim and watched people near the lodges take flash photos. I even snapped some flash photos back at the rim to play around with those people. I wonder what they said when they saw my camera flashing away?
