[Sand Clouds on the Desert, Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine, October 1860]

 

160      HUTCHINGS' CALIFORNIA MAGAZINE.

 

SAND CLOUDS ON THE DESERT.

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            THE stories told by the old traveler Bruce, of columns or pillars of sand moving with fearful rapidity over the African deserts, were regarded by many as too wonderful for belief; and probably he did draw a little too much upon his imagination in his descriptions of them. But there was much truth in his accounts there can be no doubt, as columns of this kind are observed in the smaller deserts of our own country.

            Dr. John B. Trask, writing under date of April 30th, 1860, from Virginia, in the Washoe region, says:

            " Since my last, we have had a variety of weather, the compound being made up of clear and warm, clear and cold, and cold and windy, with a half-hurricane and abundance of whirlwinds the greater part of the time. At our altitude (5,582 feet), now well determined, the view to the east is romantic and grand. On the forty-mile desert (the nearest point of which to this place is sixty-six miles), there has been for the last ten days an almost constant series of tremendous whirlwinds, which at this distance seem to travel north or south. The level of this desert is obscured from our view by a low ridge of mountains about one thousand feet high, and you may form some conception of the grand scale on which these local storms act, when I state to you that the columns of sand rise to an elevation of more than four times the height of the intervening ridge. Taking the distance into consideration, the largest column raised to this immense height, which I saw on the 22d, could not have been less than three miles in diameter, forming a feature on the atmosphere of an immense water-spout, at times witnessed at sea. These whirlwinds seem to travel about seventy miles an hour—for one of the columns rising on the southern border traveled a distance of forty miles in little less than thirty minutes. The manufacturers of geographies would do well to come to Virginia City, and study the features of sand-storms for their illustrations. Since I have been here, there have been probably not less than a dozen or more of these storms, and they all present the same features, viz.: a point of cloud descending from a broad base for a short distance, and beneath it a dark column gradually rising till a junction is formed. The sand-cloud also rises when no cloud is visible there."

            Frank Soulé, a few weeks afterwards, wrote of the same sand-clouds:

            " This has been a day of fearful winds. Clouds of snow have been hanging on the mountain tops, and scattering their burdens down ; and furious gusts and gales are sweeping from the southwest across the forty-mile desert, raising columns of sand and dust to the clouds. Some of these must be at least three thousand feet in height above the desert, and travel at great speed. Above the hills, above the highest mountain tops, we see them at a distance of from thirty-five to fifty miles, whirling upwards as if they would blot out sun and sky, while the desert itself seems like an ocean of water, dashed into billows of foam. Pitiless, indeed, seem these galloping columns of stifling dust and sand, and pitiful indeed is the condition of any poor creature, human or brute, who, caught there, is obliged to endure, or die, amid the chilling and strangling tempest."