A helluva hailstorm (again)

I had been planning on sharing some of the sights we saw on Phantom Canyon Road a couple of weekends ago, but yesterday we got hammered by a hailstorm so violent, it made the national news. So I decided to blog about that today instead. The photo above was taken by my good friend Rhonda, who's not only one of my favorite people, she's also a talented wedding florist (I have to brag on my friends every chance I get, so check her out HERE!). Rhonda's part of town got hit hard, but my neck of the woods only got an extremely heavy rainstorm that kept circling back around and dumping on us again and again, late into the night. The worst part of the storm unfortunately centered on our world famous zoo. As you can imagine, the aerial assault of baseball- to softball-sized hail sent thousands of zoo goers scurrying for cover; meanwhile, some of the animals didn't fare so well. Several were injured, and sadly, two birds were were killed:  a four year-old Muscovy duck named Daisy and a 13 year-old Cape vulture named Motswari. Even sadder, Cape vultures are endangered, and Motswari was sent to Cheyenne Mountain Zoo from South Africa several years ago to help save her species. It's a huge loss on far more than a local level.

As for the people who happened to be at the zoo when disaster struck, fourteen were injured, with about seven hospitalized (imagine being brained by a giant ball of ice hurtling out of the sky -- ouch). And every single car in the zoo's two parking lots was pulverized. It's hard to describe the destruction. It looked like an army of gorillas descended on the parking lots and smashed each and every vehicle to bits with baseball bats. Not a single one was spared; they were all rendered undriveable and every zoo goer had to be bused to Cheyenne Mountain High School. It amounted to three or four hundred cars. Just mind blowing. I'll post a video below showing the destruction of the cars, and an aerial video showing exactly how devastating this storm was to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and surrounding neighborhood.

We often get extreme weather here in the summer, and my own neighborhood has been mostly spared from every bad storm that's hit Colorado Springs this year -- this is the second baseball-sized hailstorm of the season (!!!), and there have been several smaller ones, plus a tornado warning/severe thunderstorm that scared the crap out of me, all in the last few weeks -- but in past years we haven't been so lucky. It's part of living here. But darn it, I hated hearing about the poor animals at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. My former assistant, Allison, is a dedicated zookeeper there and she's understandably very upset about this turn of events. The zoo was closed today to assess the damage, and all of its employees are mourning the loss of Daisy and Motswari.

The storm was covered on Good Morning America this morning. This video shows the hundreds of cars that were destroyed in the zoo's parking lots, plus a clip of the grizzly bears desperately trying to dodge giant hailstones.

Drone footage of the ruined cars in the parking lot this morning, as well as devastating damage to the zoo's buildings and habitats. The video also shows destruction to the houses in the surrounding neighborhood. The roofs look like they've been hit by meteors.