Haboob!!!!

We can say with increasing certainty we’ve lived through every type of weather event. And most of them when we’ve been traveling in our RV or a trailer. Hurricane(s), tornadoes, flood, blizzards, ice storms... And now we can say we’ve experienced a haboob, the Arabic term for the dust storms that hit the desert Southwest on a regular basis during monsoon season.

We left Cottonwood, Arizona last Monday for Tucson. Originally planning to head further south in Arizona, we decided to stop in Tucson when we saw openings at Catalina State Park, which we enjoyed two years ago. In addition, high winds were forecast north and south of here, and Tucson looked the best for safety. You don’t want to drive in a trailer with winds gusting over 30 mph.

We arrived safely on Monday with no wind issues, but by midnight the winds picked up and our little trailer did some rocking. Not alarming rocking (we experienced worse in Port Townsend), but we were glad we weren’t driving. The gusts picked up to 40-45 mph overnight and up to 70mph to the south of us.

Tuesday morning we woke up and were surprised to see dust hanging thick in the air outside and a fine layer of dust throughout the inside of our trailer. The EPA air quality monitor registered 325, which is as bad as we saw during our worst wildfire season (under 40 is “healthy”). It took over 24 hours for the dust to settle and AQ to return to healthy levels…which left us sitting in the trailer on an otherwise lovely sunny day to keep from breathing in the dust. In addition to the pure lung irritation of breathing in dust particles, there is an enhanced risk of contracting Valley Fever in this situation, so we really didn’t want to mess with it.

Given the chaos of our lives this past year, a Haboob felt about right. But hey. We’re still standing. We’re still OK. And the rest of our stay here has been great. Updates and plans and thoughts to come.