Arizona Tucson Mission

So living in Arizona, every August was monsoon season. And so it was torrential rain, rain I had never experienced living in Utah my whole life. And it was crazy. It was awesome because in Arizona, the weather's so warm. So this warm, just massive amounts of water and rain just pelting us as we tracked it. Back in the olden days, I'm kind of a vintage return missionary, but it was awesome to be out tracking and working in this enormous amount of rain that would just descend upon us in August and September. So the monsoon season was really, really fun. That was probably the craziest weather I'd ever been in.

Two big things on Tucson weather. One, monsoons. In the summertime it is going to rain like a dog for you know 30 minutes maybe an hour and it is going to rain like crazy and then it'll be done and everything's going to be flooded and it's going to be a wild time. But yeah, prepare for the monsoons. In the summertime it's like when one of them starts coming down, it's like find a place to just hang out until it passes because they are quick but they're intense when they're happening. And then the hot summers, taking a 30-minute nap at noon during lunchtime is valuable when you know you get exhausted if you're biking around in the you know 100 plus temperature.

So in Arizona, you'll hear a lot about the monsoon season, which is a lot of rain. And then you'll also hear about how hot it is, about like 120. But one thing that's kind of rare as well is this mixture of rain and a dust storm kind of mixed together. So it's called a haboob, I think. I'm not really sure. That's what I heard some members call it. But it's just basically like mud being thrown at your car. Hopefully you're in a car, but it's not super bad. And it passes as well, just like the monsoons do. It doesn't stay very long. But probably safe to just pull over if you're ever caught in a dust storm. That was while I was serving in New Mexico. So I don't hear it super common in Tucson. So just a heads up.

So in Tucson you're going to see two big weather conditions. There's one that everyone thinks of, it's hot, gets up to the 120s. You'll feel like you need some sunscreen, get an umbrella or something, I don't know. But then what you'll also need an umbrella for is the monsoon season. It'll rain for not super long periods of time, but during the monsoon season it'll rain and streets will be flooded, people will be freaking out, you will get wet, so that's exciting. But those are the two biggest extreme weather conditions in Tucson.

So when you think of Arizona you probably think that it's really hot and there's not like the four seasons, it's pretty much just blazing the whole time, but there's actually a season that's unique to Arizona and it's called monsoon season. So in monsoon season, which runs from about June to August, there's just crazy rain and one time I was serving up north and it just started raining, just pouring, and we actually had to pull over to the side of the road for more than 40 minutes because of how bad the rain and the flooding was. It just came down super fast and super hard and it was not safe to drive in but it was really cool.

I really think Arizona has a lot of mood swings with the weather, but one of the things that I really liked was that it was very, it was very sunny during the winter. It was about 70 to 60 degrees, and in the mornings it was maybe 30 degrees, and so it was always a good weather. But also during the summer, so it was, it would get up to 117, especially in Tucson, that would be so, so hot. And another thing as well, during August, the monsoon season, it would pour rain, but it was just so much fun because it was different, and so that's like almost your equivalent to snow here in Utah.