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The Revenge of the Rain

Finally, after what seems like an eternity of rain (it was really only 4 days), the clouds broke apart yesterday. As you could perhaps infer from my last blog about the puzzle, Josh and I were starting to get a little stir crazy. So yesterday, once the daily meeting was over we made a trip to the instrument site to do a little housekeeping, then convinced a pair of UC-Berkley students – Leendert and James – to join us on a quick hike up to the ridge overlooking our site where the wind turbine sits.

Josh leading the way up the trail past one of the instrumented towers on the mountain.

The first bit of the hike started off easily enough. The road was well cleared and the grade wasn’t too steep. About a mile in, that changed. Suddenly, we were climbing what seemed to be a vertical wall to get to the ridge!

 

Some extreme huffing and puffing later, we made it to the ridge. The view was WORTH IT! We could see beautiful panoramic views to the southwest, and an awesome birds eye view of the instrumentation throughout the valley below to our northeast. The closeup view of the wind turbine was really neat also!

Josh, James, and Leendert (L-R) at the Perdiago wind turbine

View southwest from the ridge. The Ocreza River is visible here.
View down into Vale do Cabrao where most instruments are sited.
SELFIE! Josh, me (Liz), James, and Leendert atop the ridge. You can see some of the instrumented towers in the valley behind us.

After a bit of taking in the sites on top of the ridge, we noticed a few large rain shafts had developed in the area. Surely there couldn’t be more rain coming for us! With an exasperated sigh, we took off at a brisk pace to try to beat the rain down the mountain.

Rain shafts approaching us on the ridge. That rain looks heavy!
Scurrying along the ridge, but the rain already started… note Josh’s grey jacket for proof.

 

Hurry we might, we were not successful. The rain did stay fairly light, allowing us easy passage down the very steep grade we had climbed before. Once we were on a bit more easy ground, the atmosphere had no more sympathy for us. It rained buckets.

Leendert taking some brief shelter at Vale do Cabrao’s communal oven.

We were soaked! But it was a good quick hike with lovely views! Hopefully our UC-Berkley colleagues still want to be our friends after this! I’ll leave you with a short video James shot of Josh and I coming down a steep and slippery cobblestone road into  Vale do Cobrao so you can see how we were feeling! The rain certainly put up a strong final hoorah to remind us we don’t know everything about the atmosphere!

-Liz