My house is at 9,200 feet elevation, and it looks west over the Tularosa Basin, which is at 4,300 feet. Occasionally a layer of clouds forms well below my elevation and fills the basin, as on December 2,2009. This time, I noticed a ridge in the cloud layer that I strongly suspected lay over the four-lane divided highway {US 70) that runs NE to SW across the basin. The cloud layer was quite low, but I don't know if it was touching the ground. There had been about a half inch of precipitation in the basin in the three days before December 2. In the attached photo, taken at 7:30 a.m., the mountains in the background are about 40 miles away-, the ridge in the clouds is about 20 miles away and about six miles across.
展开▼
