Sky Colors

Driving home tonight, this second evening of January, just at sunset, I was treated to a fantastic view of the sun setting behind the Front Range.

The Western sky turns all kinds of colors at different times of day.  This evening it was a pale blue, with a band of clouds hovering over the mountains.  A narrow band of blue sky under the strip of cloud allowed the rays of the setting sun to strike through, lighting the clouds up in bright copper.  The snow-covered mountains reflected the sunlight reflected from the clouds, tinting the white snow-covered mountains with their own faint wash of copper.  It was one of the most striking sunsets I’ve ever seen in almost fifteen years of living along the Front Range.

Summer evenings yield some spectacular sunsets, with the red rays of light backlighting the mountains, making them look like the rough edges of a torn strip of paper against the red sky.  But tonight’s sunset beat that.  I’ve never seen a sunset like it before.

Summer skies here in Colorado are as colorful as they are variable.  Bright blue at mid-day, gold washing into pale blue at morning and evening, pale blue in morning and afternoon.  In June, lines of thunderstorms will march across the prairie, towering thunderheads discolored like a great bruise, gray, black, purple, green, punctuated by white flares of lightning.  The gentle rains of spring and fall turn the sky pale gray, the clouds almost satiny.

Winter storms sometimes gather along the spine of the Front Range for days before spilling over into the Platte River basin where the city of Denver lies.  Great gray masses of clouds build up for two, three days, like a tumbled mass of gray cotton.  Then one morning we awake to find an inch or two of snow on the glass sunroom roof next to our bedroom, and the whole sky covered with a leaden pall.  Then, after a day or so, the storm will clear off and the weather will turn bright and cold.  That is when the sun-dogs come out.  The sun will shine bright, clear and cold in the sky, and the sun-dogs will gleam a few degrees on either side, sunlight refracted from ice crystals in the air.  Sometimes the very air itself will sparkle with faint crystals of ice suspended in the atmosphere.

Spring mornings seem to fill the sky with a pale golden glow.  Summer mornings dawn with a more yellowish flush.  Autumn mornings reverse the process, fading back to pale as winter grows near.

Some of my more business-minded friends chide me for spending as much time as I do, staring up at the sky, looking at clouds and sunsets.

They don’t know what they’re missing.