A woman in Durango was out for a walk on her lunch break Wednesday when she caught a glimpse of something you just don’t see every day.
Williamette deKay was strolling along Colorado Highway 172 on a perfectly clear, sunny day, when just before 1 p.m., a dust devil appeared above the Sky Ute Thriftway gas station parking lot.
“It was so unusual, it just stayed there,” deKay said. “It was just a little windy, but it wasn’t blustering by any means. That’s why I stopped and said, ‘What’s going on in the sky?’”
deKay said the small whirlwind lasted about a minute, just enough time to take out her phone and take a picture, before it disappeared up into the sky.
Despite the seemingly clear weather conditions, Chris Cuoco, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, said dust devils are not that uncommon on bright, sunny days.
“It could have just gotten started by blowing around a building or a tree,” Cuoco said. “When you have low-level conditions, being unstable, that kind of thing can happen.”
Cuoco said dust devils form when warm air on the ground starts moving upward and comes into contact with cooler air, causing the air and dust to increasingly spin.
“It’s just like a figure skater that’s spinning with her arms spread out, and as she pulls her arms in close, the spinning gets faster,” he said. “That’s exactly what a dust devil’s doing.”
Cuoco estimated wind speeds inside the dust devil reached 25 to 40 miles per hour.
