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.

We looked at each other and then we looked all around us and didn’t see anything that looked at all like a dust storm. We kept driving for another hour or so and then stopped at a remote gas station on a Phoenix bypass route. When we got back to the car, I looked out at the horizon over the top of a line of trucks filling up their tanks, and said, “Does that look like dust to you?”

We couldn’t really tell. But the air had a weird smell to it — a bit rank.

Back on the road, I looked off to our left a few minutes later and saw the scene in the top photo. Whoa! I’ve never seen anything like that. At first we wondered if it was just a monsoon rain coming in. But then you could see a building that was all lit up get just swallowed in a single gulp by the dust.

We could tell that it was moving diagonally and that if we could just stay ahead of it, we’d probably be fine. So my husband gunned it. Racing along at eighty-five miles an hour, I took this shot out of the side window.

I looked behind us and could see that it had moved across the road.

The big rigs were speeding up too, trying to outrun it.

We really weren’t sure if we were going to be able to go fast enough to evade it. But, it turned out that we did.

It was a little terrifying. But it was also a bit of an exhilarating experience to see the power and fury of Mother Nature in action. It is all too easy to get so wrapped up in the small things of our everyday lives that we forget to look around at the enormity of the world around us. While I am glad that we didn't get caught in the clutches of the Habood, I’m really glad to have been a witness to such an elemental force sculpting the very earth.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.