Sand and Wind

It's a blowin' and a goin' out there today. Current weather shows the wind is sustained at only 38MPH, but gusting to 51MPH. It's so bad, I'm not going to go outside to fetch the camera out of my truck so I can take pictures of it to share you. BUT, don't worry, I won't leave you emptyhanded. How about some pictures of past wind storms.

Here is one from 2001. Back at the trailer house. Yup, that wind sure is blowin' out there.

Same day, different view. This one is the back yard. We didn't even live around any fields, this is just dirt off someone's pasture.

Now, you can't tell the wind is really blowing much in this one, but believe me, it was. November 2005. When the air force burned 3/4 of my ranch and almost my house. I was 11 days post-partum and was just me, Chance, and brand new Drew. Jeff had called me from town (he was hauling hay) and said he saw some smoke, wanted to know how close to us it was. I loaded the boys up in the truck to check it out, and it was about 6 or 7 miles away, shouldn't come anywhere near us. Well, the wind shifted and it came right for us! 30 minutes after I took this shot, we were evacuated in a cloud of smoke. Was a scary day for us all, the fire burned thru the cemetery, and came right to the back door of the school (which had been evacuated and the kids hauled to a church in town).

As a result of the fire above, there was no vegetation to hold the ground down. It was a dry, windy winter. Here's a sand dune after some of that wind. In some spots, the sand covered up part of the 5 strand barb wire fence, up to the 3 wire in places. Cows were just walking over it. The fence had to be torn down, the sand scraped away with a blade, and fence rebuilt. Seven miles of it.