Madrean Monsoon
Their breath, blackened with carbon and atomized diesel, rises as the heat rippling off the parched land, bending in the stiff breeze; a scorching wind that provides little relief for the radiator cores that struggle to keep prime movers cool enough to prevent them from shutting down. Unlike the creatures that find shelter from the 110-degree heat in their holes hidden in the shade of the saltbush, there is no respite from the harshness for the caravan of faded and mismatched Centerflows and Trinities sprinkled with the here-and-there PS-2 for flavor, their lading compressing the springs on roller-bearing Barbers and stretching out the drawbar as 710 and FDL team up to drag them off the salt flats of the Animas Valley and up the grade towards the shallow saddle in the north end of the Pyramid Mountains, only then stopping for a brief pause at the oasis of Lordsburg.
Forty miles behind them, up past Steins Peak in the jagged Peloncillo Mountains, a summertime desert monsoon lays down a barrage on the vast and dry San Simon Valley over Arizona way, filling Ryan Draw and Timber Draw and Gold Gulch with raging torrents of muddy water as they wash their way down into the dry San Simon River, tumbling over stones and carrying the flotsam of the desert towards a meeting with the Gila River near Safford.
But the water that fell this day over the Madrean Sky Islands of Arizona will never find its way to the Colorado River and the Gulf of California.
Once navigable from New Mexico to Yuma, damming and diversion projects heralded by modern man have rendered the channel of the Gila River dry for a good portion of its length, and today’s rains that hammered the Pinalena Mountains and roared down their slopes will most likely suffer from evaporation and die somewhere in the Pueblo Valley.
But here, on the long climb out of a pluvial lake that dried up 11,000 years ago, there will be no monsoon downpour to slicken the railheads or cool the air---
Only a test of machines and those that are called to operate them.
The desert is content with the status quo.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
Eastbound on the Union Pacific Sunset Route near Lordsburg, NM. July 4th, 2021.
onhighiron.com/the-sunset-route
Madrean Monsoon
Their breath, blackened with carbon and atomized diesel, rises as the heat rippling off the parched land, bending in the stiff breeze; a scorching wind that provides little relief for the radiator cores that struggle to keep prime movers cool enough to prevent them from shutting down. Unlike the creatures that find shelter from the 110-degree heat in their holes hidden in the shade of the saltbush, there is no respite from the harshness for the caravan of faded and mismatched Centerflows and Trinities sprinkled with the here-and-there PS-2 for flavor, their lading compressing the springs on roller-bearing Barbers and stretching out the drawbar as 710 and FDL team up to drag them off the salt flats of the Animas Valley and up the grade towards the shallow saddle in the north end of the Pyramid Mountains, only then stopping for a brief pause at the oasis of Lordsburg.
Forty miles behind them, up past Steins Peak in the jagged Peloncillo Mountains, a summertime desert monsoon lays down a barrage on the vast and dry San Simon Valley over Arizona way, filling Ryan Draw and Timber Draw and Gold Gulch with raging torrents of muddy water as they wash their way down into the dry San Simon River, tumbling over stones and carrying the flotsam of the desert towards a meeting with the Gila River near Safford.
But the water that fell this day over the Madrean Sky Islands of Arizona will never find its way to the Colorado River and the Gulf of California.
Once navigable from New Mexico to Yuma, damming and diversion projects heralded by modern man have rendered the channel of the Gila River dry for a good portion of its length, and today’s rains that hammered the Pinalena Mountains and roared down their slopes will most likely suffer from evaporation and die somewhere in the Pueblo Valley.
But here, on the long climb out of a pluvial lake that dried up 11,000 years ago, there will be no monsoon downpour to slicken the railheads or cool the air---
Only a test of machines and those that are called to operate them.
The desert is content with the status quo.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
Eastbound on the Union Pacific Sunset Route near Lordsburg, NM. July 4th, 2021.
onhighiron.com/the-sunset-route