Yesterday morning we woke up to find a dense fog covering the “Valley of the Sun”. Les and I had already planned a hike, so I picked him up and we drove out to the south side of South Mountain. We had to drive slowly in places because of poor visibility.
To you folks who live in rainier climates, fog is a common occurrence, but it is rare here in the Sonoran desert.
As we started up the trail we couldn’t see even the outline of the sun, but as we climbed higher and higher the fog began to thin and the sun became visible, though still not too bright to look directly at. Finally, as we reached about 1000 feet above the desert floor we broke out of the fog into clear blue sky.
Just above the fog, looking northeast towards the TV towers on the peak of South Mountain. Tempe is somewhere to the right of the towers under the white blanket.
Looking west towards the Sierra Estrellas, over a sea of cloud.
The little valley we had come up through was filled with fog.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Mom // Feb 2, 2015 at 11:07 am
Now you may understand why we moved out of NY.
2 Donna // Feb 2, 2015 at 4:41 pm
Looks like when you fly over clouds in a plane. It was pretty cool while it lasted.
3 Don // Feb 3, 2015 at 7:14 pm
I loved it on those super rare occasions we got fog in Phoenix or Tucson.
We get it a LOT more here in LA. In fact there was a pretty thick fog this morning down by my work.
An interesting thing is if it’s foggy in the San Fernando Valley it’s never foggy in the South Bay and vice versa. We probably get 20-30 foggy days a year so it’s certainly not an every day thing but happens much more often than Phoenix.
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