Wild Arizona Weather

I pulled into my friend Dave's house in the Phoenix area last Sunday (Aug 12). It was, uh, a bit on the warm side. This is the thermometer on Dave's patio. It's always in the shade, but heat radiates off the patio, making the reading a little high according to Dave. Sure enough, while this thermometer says 116 degrees...it eventually topped out at 120...the official high at the airport was a mere 114. It was so hot that when I breathed through my nose, my nostrils burned! I went for a spin to run errands around 830 that evening...it had already been dark for an hour...and it was still 106. But...by dawn the mercury had plunged to 91. I went over to the fitness club in Dave's complex to cool off with a swim in the outdoor pool, but with the ongoing heat the water temperature was close to 90. It's serious hot in Phoenix during the summer!

The following day I headed for the north rim of the Grand Canyon. The heat was left behind as I climbed to Flagstaff, 7000 feet above sea level, but a different weather concern arose, in the form of a massive thunderstorm that brought biblical downpours and some small hail. Water was running through the Ponderosa pine forest everywhere! This is a pic of the mammatus clouds on the underside of the CB (cumulonimbus cloud) after I had escaped to the north. One good byproduct of driving through the storm was that my car was clean as a whistle afterward!