Skies and Scenery,New Mexico

Organ Mountains

This beautiful scene, is just east of my house in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  It is a fairly normal view of mountains in mid-afternoon during the summer time.  But this scene can change rapidly if a storm is brewing.  Each sunrise over the mountains seems completely different and the reflections onto them from the sunset can range from brilliant pink to grey with wonderful shades in between. In this photo the desert has not yet begun to bloom from the summer monsoons.

Dripping Springs

Tucked into one of the folds of the Organ Mountains is Dripping Springs Canyon.  Normally Dripping Springs looks like the photo on the right.  But after rains from Hurricane Dolly, July 2008, the picture changed a bit. When the storm traveled across Texas after hitting the Gulf Coast area around Port Isabel and Brownsville, Texas.  After traveling over West Texas Dolly ended dumping over 3 and a half inches of rain in the area around Las Cruces.  In an area that normally sees on an average of ten inches of rainfall a year 3 1/2 inches is a lot. 

    In the town of Ruidoso which is about 2 1/2 hours northeast of Las Cruces there was some very bad flooding. It is amazing to see what a hurricane can do even after being slowed down over land.

This is what Dripping Springs looked like the day after the rain. Luckily the flooding around Las Cruces was minimal. The really good news is that this rain will prime the landscape for the wildflower season.   The mountains behind this cacti are the very same Organ Mountains pictured at the top of this page. But here they are still shrouded in mist.  The WesternDay flowers, Indian Paint Brush, the Sacred Datura, Thistles and other flowers have already begun to bloom.