Weather

About the mask and what’s in the air

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I’ve been thinking about my lungs lately, especially as we recently passed the third anniversary of the week the world shut-down due to a microscopic lung invader. Don’t worry, I’m not going to preach about COVID. But I’m going to forego the usual travel blog this week to let my science nerd out. If you’re not into this, that’s fine, but I hope you’ll take a moment to at least wonder why millions of people in the world are still wearing masks, and why wearing a mask, for most people, is simply not the big deal that it is in the USA.

No one had to tell me there was a fire near town when I saw this sunset. This sight is all too familiar to a Coloradan.
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Cinque Terre Trails Part 1: Corniglia to Riomaggiore

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I came to Cinque Terre to hike. I expected late September to be warm but not hot on the Ligurian coast. I had not anticipated things to be unstable, with a front coming in that promised some steady rain, or at least some good thunderstorms. Normally, I’d be excited by a some storm activity, but I really wanted to hike. It’s actually illegal to hike the Cinque Terre trails in the rain. The trails close at the checkpoints that sit on the edge of each village. So, on my first morning in Corniglia, I was up early, hoping to get on the trail and beat the incoming storm to the neighboring town of Manarola. Based on local radar and satellite images, I figured I had a couple hours. I decided to make a run for it – as much as you can ‘run’ up a steep, rocky trail that takes you up nearly 1000 feet.

Looking northward along the Cinque Terre coastline on a cloudy day in late September.
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World on Fire

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I haven’t yet written about the day last year when the sky turned black at midday. It was so dark that my garden lights came on in the dim, orange twilight. But it’s August and we’re in fire season again. I find myself thinking about that day again because I’m cooped up at home with the windows closed as another smoke plume moves over Northern Colorado. Last year, we inhaled smoke and ash from late last summer to several weeks into autumn. The fires kept our skies grey for the better part of two months. But I distinctly remember that day just before Labor Day in early September when I braved the smoky air and temperatures over 90F to harvest my garden in preparation for an unseasonably early snow storm.

September 2020 in Greeley, CO – The day that turned black.
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Disequilibrium on Stormy Seas

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I think that there is always a brief moment, when the world begins to lurch in a new direction, when we all try to deny what we’re feeling – when we try to deny that everything is off kilter. A few weeks ago, I gathered with a group of women from Homeward Bound via Zoom for a community yoga class. At some point, in a balance pose, I remembered the disequilibrium I felt crossing the Drake Passage in a storm. The initial rise in ocean swell came on slowly. So slowly, it was hard to tell anything was changing, except for the stirrings in my stomach.

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Crossing the Drake Passage aboard the MV Ushuaia in a storm in January 2019.  Photo from a video filmed by Lesley Sefcik. I think, for many of us, life right now feels somewhat like being on a ship in a storm.

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FOMO and Misty Days at Cuverville Island and Neko Harbor

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View from my bed as I missed out on a zodiac cruise.

What is it you’re afraid of missing out on while you read this post? What do you feel tugging at you’re attention, while at the same time you looking forward to the cute penguin picture you know I’ve buried somewhere on this page? I know that feeling of missing out. That anxious feeling that urges you to skip ahead and skim right to the prize, then move on to something else.

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Snowpocalypse 2017

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Summer is my season. You might think that I’d be enamored with snow, being a meteorologist and having grown up along Coastal California, where seeing snow involved a 6-hour drive to Tahoe. I do enjoy snow – there’s nothing like a good blizzard on some long weekend in February when I can hunker down at home with a cup of tea and watch it snow enough to where finally put on my skis and head over to the neighborhood park. But 8-inches in late May? (Heads up: basic meteorology lesson coming!)

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Heavy snowfall, just getting underway on Thursday, May 18, 2017.

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Summer Hike #1 – Grayrock Trail

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When I was about 5 years old, I had to explain to my 80-year-old great-grandmother how a tape recorder worked. She asked me lots of questions, and I patiently explained all the buttons. I’m sure she was humoring me, but I felt so surprised that someone so old wouldn’t know how something works. “She grew up in the horse and buggy days,” my mom told me when I asked her about it, “Imagine how much change she’s seen in her lifetime!”

I remember thinking that it must have been really hard for her to keep up – given how fast things were moving. I felt lucky to have been born after such big technological revolutions as tape recorders and televisions. I wouldn’t have such a hard time keeping up. (Ha.)

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Pasque flowers on the trail to Gray Rock.

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Meteorology Field Camp in the Andes!

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Imagine a high, windswept, rolling plain, with tall grasses sprouting from spongy soil. This is a place where you can watch the clouds and feel them engulf you before they scurry past, as they race to the next mountain top. The sky here is ever-changing, offering an occasional glimpse of blue, where wispy cirrus cruise by at a leisurely pace high above compared to the ragged cumulus and foggy patches that race by just above your head.

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Llamas on the páramo. They were our audience as we hiked to one of the weather stations.

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Life and times on the slopes of the Andes

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If you’ve been following this blog, on thing you might notice here is the BLUE SKY. While I do post pictures of Cuenca with blue skies, those photos were taken in rare moments. You will also notice the color of the vegetation turns brown further down the slope – that is the desert at the base of this immense valley.

Living in the Andes has forced me to rethink everything I know about what drives weather and shapes climate. I come from a country where it’s always winter in December – no matter where you are. In Ecuador, people will change their minds about what season it is depending on what’s happening right outside their window. Also, there is such wide variation in ‘season’ and climate from one valley to the next, from the east slope of the Andes to the west. Two hours in a car, descending thousands of feet, can take you from a cool, cloudy mountain climate to a desert. Last week I visited the Yunguilla valley – an hour away from Cuenca – but another world entirely.

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Abril, aguas mil y lodo, lodo everywhere

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The Ecuadorians have a saying ‘Abril, aguas mil.’  (And lodo=mud.) The direct translation is roughly: April – a thousand waters (and I added the part about the mud). You get the idea – it’s basically the same sentiment as ‘April showers bring May flowers.’ True to form, the atmosphere has delivered us aguas mil this month. For that matter, March was also a month of aguas mil. I have become accustomed to donning rain gear, boots, and marching out of the house with my giant umbrella (mi sombrillo gigante!) that I purchased on a street corner in a moment of soggy desperation sometime back in March. Everyday I wish we could send some of this deluge off to California, where people actually need the water.

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A Cuenca city bus about to cross a bridge over the muddy and raging Tomebamba river not far from my office at the satellite campus at the University of Cuenca.

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