No Nukes

I was returning home with friends from a backpacking trip in the San Juan National Forest northwest of Durango, Colorado. Later, as we were driving north on US Highway 85/87 just south of Pueblo on Sunday, May 30, 1982, we witnessed this lone towering cumulonimbus cloud in the direction of the city. Because of its mushroom-shaped appearance and the fact that there were no other clouds in sight, we joked that maybe Pueblo had just been nuked in a Cold War attack. As we got closer, though, it was WE who found ourselves under "attack." Our vehicle got hammered with golf ball-sized hail from the storm, forcing us to pull over to side of the road until it passed.