Hail Storm

Last night we had plans to go putt-putt with the Miles and about 5 minutes before we were supposed to walk out the door to leave, it started sprinkling rain. There was a slow rain for a while, and then we heard the thunder start rolling. I checked weather.com and it still said only about 10% chance of precipitation and nothing about a storm. I've noticed this to be the case when a storm moves in it comes pretty sudden without warning and weather.com is not too accurate about predicting storms in the Springs. I guess maybe the mountains mess with the weather. Right now this is the cloudy season. We've been told Colorado Springs has about 300 days of sun out of each year. We've experienced almost half of our cloudy days then since we've been here already.

So after it was thundering a while we started to notice some lightning flashes. As we were talking to the Miles family trying to decide if this was going to pass or not we noticed the rain start to "sparkle" almost when falling. We realized this was hail. It started hailing about 6:50 and didn't stop until after 8:30. Our roof sounded like a lot of little people skipping all around on us. As I type this, I'm listening to our neighbor behind us blowing tree branches and leaves off of his roof with a leaf blower. We have 3 large pine trees outside our apartment windows and as the hail was hitting the branches it was making a sort of natural potpourri making our apartment smell like Christmas when you stood by the windows. We had fun checking out the hail when it slowed down at one point, and here are some pictures and a video as a result.

And so this was our first hail storm in Colorado Springs. We were warned before we moved here this was pretty much the one negative thing to living in the Springs as there will most likely be more hail storms throughout the summer months. We did find dents on the hoods of our cars. Nothing major though and you can only see them at the right angle with the light hitting the hoods right. Some apartments on the first floor of our building had some flooding because of all of the rain along with the hail melting. The road next to our apartment has a nice incline to it so at one point during the storm the water was running down it fast and the road looked like a river. In the video you can probably hear the sirens in the background. We heard sirens most of the time throughout the hail storm, but we aren't sure what they were answering too. It could have been lightning damage. I guess possible car wrecks because the hail started so suddenly and it came down hard and fast. Maybe they were responding to major flash flooding some people were experiencing in parts. This hail was quite a new experience for us, but I'll be fine if we don't see another one this summer.