{"id":137080,"date":"2023-06-04T05:45:57","date_gmt":"2023-06-04T11:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=137080"},"modified":"2023-06-04T06:23:18","modified_gmt":"2023-06-04T12:23:18","slug":"yesterdays-hailstorm-violent-destructive-and-capricious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/04\/yesterdays-hailstorm-violent-destructive-and-capricious\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s Hailstorm – Violent, Destructive And Capricious"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a depressing aftermath.<\/p>\n

Early yesterday afternoon, after nearly six hours of driving and looking for cooperative birds with little success, I ate lunch and began fading fast so I went down for a nap. It was sunny and calm when I hit the sack. Perhaps 30 minutes later, at a little after 1 PM, I was awakened by individual explosive sounds coming from my roof. For the first minute or so there were maybe five seconds between each sound. Then all hell broke loose.<\/p>\n

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It was one of the worst hailstorms I’d ever experienced in Utah – not so much because of the amount of hail but because of its speed as it was coming down. There was no wind to speak of but each individual hailstone, about the diameter of a nickel, was coming down so fast it was like it had been fired from a gun.<\/p>\n

My pickup was parked in my driveway so I opened the garage door. The sound of the hail hitting my hood and windshield was deafening. I was sure my pickup would be damaged but thankfully I don’t believe it was.<\/p>\n

This is what my patio and deck looked like during a brief lull in the storm before things got nasty again. The hailstorm lasted for about 15 minutes and when it was over my world had changed.<\/p>\n

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Before the storm the rhubarb in my garden was robust and thriving.<\/p>\n

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This is what it looked like later in the afternoon after I’d summoned up the courage to go out and inspect my garden for damage.<\/p>\n

This year my vegetable gardening activities have been limited by my recovery from back surgery but I’d put a lot of effort into the few things I did plant so it was disheartening to see the effects of the hail. My tomatoes and amaranth were battered badly but I have hopes that they’ll be able to make some sort of comeback. The thought of a summer and early fall without BLT’s using garden tomatoes is depressing. My zucchini may or may not survive. Thankfully I planted my lemon cucumbers late so they’re still quite small and some of them escaped damage completely.<\/p>\n

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During the storm, both in the back and in front of my house, every large tree looked like it was raining leaves. This is the debris field in my back yard beneath two of my catalpa trees.<\/p>\n

The hail and its damage were extremely localized. Immediately after the storm I made a short inspection tour in my pickup. There was a leafy green debris field beneath all the trees lining the streets in my neighborhood but a quarter mile away to the northeast there was no damage at all to any of the trees or to anything else that I could see.<\/p>\n

There’s a fox squirrel in my neighborhood that I call Bandito because ‘he’ has learned to climb the pole one of my bird feeders is hanging from and steal enormous amounts of bird seed. I buy high quality seed and it’s expensive so Bandito isn’t one of my favorite neighborhood characters.<\/p>\n

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Near the beginning of the storm (this photo was taken a little later) I spotted Bandito running for his life from right to left across the top of my back fence as those icy bullets were slamming into him. He was obviously running for refuge in the snowball bush hanging over my fence.<\/p>\n

I’ll admit it. I was rooting for the hail.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a depressing aftermath. (5 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,6936],"tags":[6940,5047,6939,6937,3289,6938],"class_list":["post-137080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ecology-and-environment","category-fox-squirrels","tag-bandito","tag-catalpa-tree","tag-fox-squirrel","tag-hailstorm-damage-in-garden-and-yard","tag-murray-utah","tag-rhubarb"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/hail-on-6-3-23-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-zEY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137080"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137132,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137080\/revisions\/137132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}