Yep, if you’re hearing about it we were in the middle of it, and you had to see it to believe it.

At first, here in Gilbert, it didn’t look like much: the sky had its usual brown tint, albeit this time from the south and the southwest. It was ominous. Normally, our dust storms follow the usual monsoonal flow from the southeast, but my experience has been that when they come from the south they’re especially bad. The one we had in 2012 comes to mind. So the fact that this one was coming from the south and the southwest told me this was going to be a little different.

I snapped a couple of photos only a minute before it hit:

This one was kind of a strange dust storm. Sure we got wind, but it never made it over much more than a dirty, damned breeze. And then there was the duration: typically, our dust storms are short but intense, lasting 10-15 minutes, but this one kept coming. And coming. And coming. 40 minutes. The whole world turned into a brown haze, as if we were trapped inside a dust globe. And just to walk out in it was to feel the grit in your eyes and ears, in your mouth, on your skin. At times, the visibility was so bad, you couldn’t even make out the power lines on the other side of the canal to our north. The dust was so thick, it coated the street in our sub-division with a soft layer of brown:

My poor patio and tiki bar! Everything I washed down last Sunday now has the feeling of a soft furry carpet, the dust is so thick.

Compounding the problem is that we never got any rain – nada – out of the severe thunderstorm that kicked the dust storm up. Other folks might have, but we didn’t. Not one friggin’ drop. So that means that until we get either a strong storm system storm that blows the dust away (not likely, this time of year) or a heavy rainfall that will drop mud all over the place, the dust is likely to hang around for days, if not weeks. On the other hand, there ought to be some stunning Arizona sunsets the next few days!

We’ve been living here in the Valley of the Sun for almost fifteen years. I’d have to say that this dust storm might have been the mother of them all.