A Magical Arches Thunderstorm

Today I was privileged to witness a rare event...a thunderstorm with a torrential downpour in Arches National Park.  It all happened around the area known as Park Avenue.  The first things that caught my eye were these rocks sitting on a ledge, hundreds of feet above the ground.   They apparently fell off the cliff in the background and stayed put on the ledge rather than bouncing/rolling all the way down to the bottom of the canyon.  Kind of surreal.

 

From the south end of Park Avenue, the afternoon skies grew foreboding.  But the light was superb.

And the rain came in torrents!  This picture is blurry, but what happened here is that water cascaded from the top of the rock tower marked by the vertical wall at upper left, then swept down the sloping part of the rock to the ground.  It was extraordinary!  This only went on for about a minute...as soon as the heavy rain eased a little bit the thousand foot cascade vanished.  Has to be very rare to witness this.  To put a scale to it, it's at least 250 feet from the top of the slope where the water is running to the bottom.  Look closely and you can see a couple more waterfalls on the rock face.  I tried taking a pic with the car window down but my camera lens had water on it within a second.  So I had to close the window and take the pic through the glass.

The aftermath.  Rain fell for about twenty minutes but only came down hard for 3-5.  Still, that was enough to generate numerous waterfalls off the slickrock.  Blow up this pic and you can see two...one middle left, and another at the lower left.  And of course the rock gleams with moisture for a short time after the downpour.

A zoom shot of a slickrock waterfall.  Probably about 200 feet from the top of the pic to the bottom...hard to judge.

Park Avenue turns out to be a mostly "paved" path through the valley.  Here, longer duration heavy rains have eroded the soil and created a slickrock path through the canyon.  Today's rain did not last long enough to fire up a river, but imagine two or three feet of water roaring through here during a slow moving monsoon storm in late summer. 

The storm retreats, leaving a wet slickrock path with numerous puddles.

Ripples in the soil are evidence of past floods of much greater intensity than today's.

Sunflowers thrive in the spring rains.

As the slickrock dries, a vast pattern of puddles endures.

A couple hours later, another storm sweeps through, a few miles north of the earlier one that hit the area where I'm standing to take the pic.