Monsoons & canyons ...

Two great sights that look great together.

Only in the Rockies ...

... do you get driving hail, torrential rain, thunder, lightning, flooding -- and sunshine -- all at the same time.

Read more about yesterday's wicked monsoon storms in the Durango Herald here.

The view from Hermosa Cliffs

What a welcome few days. Cool and damp. It reminds me of Norway, and the Yukon, and Alaska -- places we ventured the past few summers, where the summers are, well, cool and damp ... I'm a temperate-zone kinda guy, so for me there are few things as lovely as a damp view of mountains shrouded in togas of cloud.

So, following a summer with with our own climatological recession underway -- a lack of those refreshing monsoonal flows that usually move over the region in the late summer -- the past few days have been a welcome infusion of wet, temperate weather.

So after Saturday's all-night rain, we headed up to the hills to check out our mountains wrapped in moisture.

Here's a view from the top of the Hermosa Cliffs. Makes me glad we didn't head anywhere else this year. (Click to enlarge.)