Thunderstorm at Sunset in the Desert...

Andrea and I are out at DM today.   There was a thunderstorm.   I took some fairly decent pictures, considering that the only camera I had with was the iPhone.   This one is looking up toward Fort Bowie - as you can see, the fort is completely inundated.

This is looking to the north.   Nice rainbow.   You get a lot of these in the desert in Arizona during monsoon.   Would have liked a longer lens - the rainbow was a lot more impressive in person.

Barrel cactus.   The evening light was very orange, which made the flowers really stand out.

These are the same prickly pear cactus that had lovely orange blossoms on them a couple of months ago.   The little purple things are the pears.   You can make jam with them.   You have to be careful not to get stuck, though - they're covered with little furry spines.

This is a new addition - I've never really noticed these here before.   They have lovely purple flowers which are all closed, unfortunately.   The wild thing about these plants is that outside of monsoon, I think they would just shrivel up and blow away.

The light here looks kind of fake, which is funny because actually this doesn't even capture the light at sunset.   But it's not a bad try.   It's unbelievably warm light - you feel like you're being bathed in a warm orange flame, and the land around you glows happily with you.

I don't know what this little guy is - the leaves remind me of peas, but they're much tougher - if you could isolate the fiber, you could probably make paper from it.

Anyway, that's the news for tonight from the desert.