Photography, Travel
A Desert Dust Storm on the Road to Tucson
Outrunning a “Habood”
Desert skies always seem so enormous. I don’t know why — maybe it’s just because the horizon stretches so far off into the distance. But on our drive from California to Tucson last week, I found my gaze lost in the towering monsoon clouds gathering all around us.
We’d spotted several “dust devils” — mini tornados — twisting from the desert floor up into the heavens. And fingers of rain, backlit by the afternoon sun, reached down here and there. But a dust storm was the furthest thing from our minds that day.
I lived in Tucson from age eleven to twenty-one and I’d never seen a “Habood” — the local name for a dust storm, although I recently had an old reel-to-reel tape from my grandparents scanned. It was of their drive from California to Tucson in the 1950’s. They’d been caught in a dust storm and it looked pretty terrifying. I’d heard them tell the story when I was growing up but I’d never seen the footage.
I’d told my husband about it earlier in the drive that day. So it was pretty ironic when we got this emergency alert on our phones.
