Dust Rampage: Moab Comes to Colorado!

I came to Paonia in a rideshare with a local farm owner, and all the way through the Rockies we talked geology, bees, organics, adventure, and air quality. The air in Paonia, she told me, was clear. But when we came over the rise and caught our first glimpse of the North Fork valley, what did we see? Why, a dusty dry haze in the sky.

As the day went on, the sky got darker; by early evening it was a thick, bruised purple in the west, and a mucky reddish-brown stretching up the valley. I ran into a couple of locals at the Trading Post, and they told me it wasn’t normal at all: this was the edge of a huge dust storm being kicked up in Utah and blowing all the way to the Rockies.

As the sun sank, the dust filled the air more and more, coating everything finely— including the mountains, whose snowpack turned reddish overnight. Meanwhile, the Gunnison River roared past, carrying tons of silt back down the hill. The grass and trees kept pushing out new green leaves, clear and fresh: the air and water turned the soil. It all made quite a bit of sense, in the exciting way that only major natural phenomena can.

Still, there have been a lot of dust storms this spring. People are starting to worry about it: a dry winter and increased land use (by livestock, off-roading and road development) lead to more gunk in the air, which means more gunk in locals’ lungs. In addition, the dust on the snowpack leads to snow albedo, causing snow to melt off the mountains more quickly. If there’d been more precipitation this winter, that could have caused some serious floods.

But there wasn’t a lot of precipitation, just a big cold dust bowl that took to the sky all through April. To my naive, artistic eye, it looked beautiful. Beautifully ominous.

If you want to learn more about the dust storm phenomenon, try this USGS page with photos, satellite movies and scientific articles.