I was out on Thursday night watching the skies. We were doing geology field work in some remote-ish part of eastern UT/western CO and we brought our camping gear, planning on camping out that night so we could do more work the next day. And to watch the skies. We were in a high desert area. We got to our camp spot (just a random secret place overlooking a canyon) at 5ish.
It was partly cloudy with some thundershowers in the area. We sat and watched the clouds and the canyons for a while. I saw what I thought was a bear walking around in the bottom of the canyon way below us, I got a glimpse of something dark walking among the bushes. We watched a rainstorm develop in a canyon about a mile east of us, the setting sun making an impressive rainbow that lasted a long time. It started to rain heavy in that canyon (not raining where we were) and we were amazed that we could hear the roar of the rain falling! I wondered if the canyon "flashed" (flash flood) but we couldn't see if it did from where we were.
As the sun set the storms and clouds dried up, as I expected they would. We set the tent up. As it got dark some storms lingered far away in some mountain ranges on the horizon. As it got dark we could see the lightning from the storms in the mountains and they lit off for several more hours, that was a great show! Even though we had set the tent up we decided to haul our bedding out onto some sandstone outcrop and slept out there. We would wake up periodically to watch the sky for a while. We saw the best meteors early in the evening. One of them was amazing: it was low in the southwest sky and flew parallel to the horizon for what seemed like forever. Soon after that two went at once right overhead, parallel to each other. We also saw several satellites go overhead. You have to watch carefully and for a long time in dark skies to see them. The Milky Way, right overhead, was magnificent of course. I had heard that the best meteor show was between 12am and sunrise. I woke at 2am and saw a few, and then at 4am and saw a few more. None were as good as earlier in the evening.
That's my Perseid Meteor Shower story for 2015.
The next day we went into the canyon that got the big rainstorm. The road into it was full of big puddles and the creek was running muddy about 8 inches deep. (We had seen that canyon from above earlier in the previous day and the creekbed was a series of stagnant puddles then.) It had probably flashed a couple feet deep. I love rain in the desert.
