Since it has been such a banner year for clouds, I thought I would close with a few more photos of them.

Does this photo remind you of one I posted earlier in the December retrospective? Does it surprise you that these photos were taken nearly a month apart? If you went down to a creek and saw the same standing waves on different days, would that surprise you? I think this is the most startling thing about lenticular clouds. They form in standing waves shaped by mountains and valleys. If the wind and humidity are similar on two different days, similar cloud patterns will form. And again, they don’t travel with the wind, they remain where the pressure changes happen.

That’s what I tell myself when I get wanderlust: all the exciting stuff happens right here where the pressure changes are. There’s no need to go running around the globe to see amazing things, there are enough here right in your own backyard. Yeah, well, that trick never works for long, but it does get me to go to new locations near me looking for unknown things, tucked away in little canyons.