We started the morning off in Pueblo, CO and headed south to New Mexico after a quick oil change. The km’s are really starting to get up there! We ran into a storm just north of Walsenburg, Colorado.

Even more impressive than the storm, was the landscape in extreme Southern Colorado where you can feel the prairie grassland of the front range about to give way to the scrubby desert environment. The storms, couples with the colours and contrasts created by the mountains is beautiful.

I found it fitting that a UPS truck happened to go whizzing past, I guess these couriers really do deliver everywhere!

Just outside of town, we punched the backside of the storm and found ourselves pelted with small hail. These storms were super slow moving, and hail was piling into drifts everywhere and flooding out the interstate.

Once past the storm (which was fun to drive through) we stopped to watch it slowly roll out over the open landscape. I saw a couple chasers blast up a dirt road behind it but with the flash flooding and poor road network it was probably better to just let this one go.

Further down the road, it was amazing to see how the landscape transitioned, literally over the course of a few miles from alpine forest, to a dead drought stricken forest in a rain shadow and then instantly into a sprawling desert environment just over the New Mexico border. I’ll net get used to how quickly these environments change!

What is nice with the downslope side of mountains/hills and other things is that you get wicked gas mileage. I was probably getting closer to 200 MPG but the computer tops out at 99, I was basically idling as gravity was doing all the work.

While at a service center a healthy storm literally formed out of nothing to our immediate east near Maxwell, NM. The only real problem was that the road network sucked and we could not get up under the cell.

For a while it looked to gave good potential.

Every now and then a little shear pocket would develop and a small area of scud would tighten up and begin rotating into a funnel like tip and then it would loose the upward energy and that was it. After watching the storm cell for a few hours we let it go and headed into town.

Again, the geography of the landscape is just fascinating to me!

Here is the Maxwell storm cell from the south looking north.

We drove through several small towns, but New Mexico is really a barren state, a little like North Dakota. The distances between civilization can be pretty big at times!

Again, more awesome geography!

This was the dead zone, all desert, no civilization, no services for 150 miles.

Alright off to bed!