This is where water comes to die.
When the summer solstice brings about a shift in the winds, the westerlies become the southerlies, and the virgas that never reach the ground in winter cede to the monsoons of June.
Laden with moisture off the Gulfs of California and Mexico, the gathering convection thunderstorms will unleash their power on the slopes of the Dragoons and the Chiricahuas and the rest of the Madrean Sky Islands and fill the draws and the washes with their fury, the hard and dry soils unable to absorb the torrent as it rushes out to the vineyards and orchards, overwhelming culverts and catchments and rushing across roads and turning normally unseen depressions into dangerous tsunamis of silty runoff. The winds will scour the land and great clouds of dust will rise and the storms will pound the arid soils of the Sulphur Springs Valley, creating a muddy hail that leaves nothing unscathed.
And if there is more rain than what the land can claim, it becomes captive here: The Willcox Playa, a pluvial paleolake that has no outlet to the rivers or the seas, and that last held water 11,000 years ago.
When the glaciers receded, so did the jet stream, and with them went the rains that once made this place lush.
Succumbing to low humidity and high solar radiation, it is here that the water will die, literally vanishing into thin air.
The Southern Pacific laid a single track across the northwestern portion of the dry lake during the summer of 1880 and founded the town of Maley when it reached the northern shore. The town was renamed Willcox in 1889 in honor of General Orlando B. Willcox, Commander of the Department of Arizona. It was his troops that chased the Apaches into the Chiricahuas and held them there at bay.
Once used as a bombing range by the air force, the playa was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1966.
With an elevation of 4,167 feet above sea level, the Sulphur Springs Valley of southern Arizona fits the definition of “high desert.” With an average of less than one inch of precipitation for the month, what rain does fall here during February rarely reaches the ground, but it makes for some spectacular cloud formations and virgas in the evenings.
With a gale-force wind ravaging the dry lakebed and the dust rising to meet the rain before it evaporates, SD70ACe 8789 and SD70M 4684 roll westbound containers across the playa at 5:19 pm on February 16th, 2021.
Rick Malo©2022
With the Chiricahua mountains in the background, eastbound containers roll fast across the playa at 12:56 pm on February 16th, 2021.