Salton City was extremely hot over the 4th of July weekend.  I arrived in the evening hours of July 3rd and remained until Monday morning July 7th.  Tropical depression Douglas off the coast of Baja California swept most of Mexico's humid and wet weather towards Arizona and it turned Salton City into what felt like a gigantic hot house.  As far as I know no rain fell in the Salton city area.

No fireworks show was displayed in Salton city for the 4th of July.  The only fireworks were people who bought and used from fireworks stands.  I was part of the latter.  Back in National City where I live primarily at the moment, fireworks can only be viewed at public displays unless they are brought in illegally.  This type of celebration of the 4th (America's birthday) I do not like or agree with.  I prefer celebrating with my own fireworks display around my immediate family and friends rather then put up with public and sometimes intoxicated people.

On Saturday night however, we were greeted with a lightning show which I prefer over any fireworks display.  I attempted to photograph some for this page however my camera was too slow and the photo's taken were merely black boxes not worth displaying.  I did take pictures of the Thunderheads surrounding Salton city.  Here is the first:

This Thunderhead shows a smaller forming cloud rising to meet the upper cloud and is looking towards the southwest.  It was the closest cloud to Salton city.  This one dissipated by nightfall and produced no lightning that we saw and no rain.

The second one however, produced much more lightning but was too far distant to hear the thunder.

This was the first in a line of Thunderheads over the Chocolate mountains and in a fairly southeast direction pretty much following the Chocolate Mountain range which is located along the eastern shore of the Salton sea.  When Tom Cruise in the Top Gun movie was getting his top gun training, part of it was filmed over the Chocolate mountains if you remember the movie.  Had I remembered and I feel kind of dumb for not doing it was that my camera does film video in HD and I could have filmed some of the lightning had I remembered.
Some of my neighbors came over since I was sitting in the garage with the door up to enjoy the lightning spectacle with my son and it was enough to socialize.  The lightning by around 9:30 pretty much dissipated but the socializing continued.

On Sunday afternoon, Salton city experienced a power outage which started around 4:20 pm and lasted nearly two hours.  The house was quickly getting warmer since the air conditioning unit was not functioning.  I was going to wait till 7pm that night and if the power did not return by then, I was going to head back to National City since I suspect it would have been too hot to sleep that evening for the next days scheduled drive home.  Thank goodness that wasn't the case.  These power outages do occur from time to time and I'm not sure what is the cause.  Imperial Irrigation will probably have to be contacted to find the cause.  My guess is that since it was hot and their territory lies mostly in desert areas, every house and business were probably using air conditioning that there was not enough electricity to go around.  When the outage occurred, I called them and they had teams out to fix the outage and that it also affected Indio and La Quinta.


Well I hope you enjoyed this post for I as usual enjoyed the weekend to be able to write about it.  My next scheduled post will follow the Labor day weekend which is the 30th, 31st of August and the 1st of September 2014.  Till then and have a good day!