Canyon Weather
Everybody talks about the weather and not just because it is a neutral topic. No. Weather can involve life or death. Last week two members of the Fee department were hiking in Kanab Creek wilderness, an area of deep and narrow canyons when they narrowly avoided being swept to the Colorado River in a flash flood.
It’s not that flash floods are foreign to the Grand Canyon, but they are usually limited to the monsoon season, July through first week of September, or during spring melt run-off. To have a flash flood in June is unheard of. June is the month of greatest heat and least rain. Yet, this June the Canyon has had monsoonal like rain storms in June.
I thought we were in for weather that was unusual, at least in my experience in the Canyon, when we got 17.5 inches of snow in the last week of October 2004. And the winter of 2004-2005 was snowier than usual with snow blocking the road until the end of April and snow cuddled around trees at the edges of the meadow until late June. The standing water on the meadows was different than previous years as well.
What does this tell us? It tells us that there is no pattern set in stone. Change is all around us. Unpredictability is the norm. Perhaps it also gives us a glimpse into the mind of those who went before us. If the weather could not be counted on perhaps it was due to forces that had to be apeased. Perhaps patterns could only be found by appealing to something greater than us. Perhaps such a being could control nature if we could not.