Loading…
30
The old guy at the Pawnee Grasslands trailhead taught me to read mammatus clouds and I still think about it
Two summers back I was out at the Pawnee National Grasslands in Colorado, just east of Fort Collins, waiting out a storm that had rolled through and left that weird yellow light everywhere. This older guy, probably in his 70s, was packing up his camera gear next to me and pointed up at this lumpy ceiling of clouds that looked like a bunch of gray sacks hanging down. I had seen them before but never knew what they were called or why they looked like that. He told me they were mammatus clouds and that they show up on the back side of bad storms, which is why the sky behind them usually looks so calm and strange at the same time. He also said pilots hate them because they mean turbulence is still hanging around even after the storm has moved on. I asked how he knew so much and he just laughed and told me he had been chasing storms on the plains for 40 years and the clouds always tell you what's coming next if you pay attention. We ended up standing there for maybe 20 minutes just watching them slowly fade out. Has anybody else caught mammatus clouds out on the eastern plains, and do they always show up after storms for you too?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
sandra_black9d ago
Wait, pilots actually hate mammatus clouds? That part blew my mind. I always thought those sack-looking clouds were just a pretty sight after a storm and nothing more. Forty years of storm chasing on the plains is wild too, that guy has probably seen stuff most of us never will. I have only caught mammatus a couple times myself and both were after storms had already passed, so your experience lines up with mine. Standing there for 20 minutes just watching them fade sounds like the best part of the whole day.
7