My First Haboob

On my drive back to Phoenix from the border I ended up driving thru a haboob, or a huge dust storm. I was probably about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix when I had to stop at a gas station. I had pulled off the road across from Picacho Peak State Park, gassed up, used the rest room and got a couple of snacks for the car, a total of about 10 minutes or so. When I had pulled off, the sky to the west was looking a little dark and hazy, and I thought there was a big storm coming. It had rained almost every evening at the resort, or somewhere around the resort. It was almost like Florida in that there were small squalls that would roll thru, and after about 10 minutes the sky was clear again. So I thought this would be no big deal.

When I got back on the road and started driving, I was monitoring the haze as it moved closer and I thought it was strange that it didn’t really look like rain was coming down, but was hazy like it was raining. After about 10 minutes on the road I found out what it was, a large dust storm, or haboob.

At first it wasn’t too bad, just a lot of wind and blowing dust. But then visibility started to deteriorate. At the time it hit, I was about an hour from my hotel in Phoenix. It took me double that time to get there as the speeds on the highway had dropped to roughly 20 mph. It was like driving thru the worst fog banks I have ever driven thru in Wisconsin. And there were several accidents that I passed along the way; cars from the southbound lane in the median, or worse, across the northbound lanes of traffic. It was really sort of amazing. The light was a yellowish-brown, and you might be able to see roughly about a car to two cars in front of you and that was it. Luckily, no one going in my direction wanted to be a douche and go breezing by at freeway speeds.

By the time I got into Phoenix, it was a little better since there wasn’t as much dust to blow around. It was really something to see how the dust just coated everything. By the time I got to my hotel and was able to pull over my rental car was a mess. The nearest thing I can compare it to was when Kris and I went on our honeymoon and I had to park my car in a surface lot at O’Hare for a week. While it was something cool to experience, I really hope I don’t ever have to drive in one again.