People like to complain about the weather. They should try living without it.
That's right, no weather. In the inland Northwest, I haven't had any weather since the dry season started in late June. In other words, one day has been like the next for 3 months.
But I am not complaining. By camping above 5000 feet of altitude, mid-day temperatures never got over 90 F, and the horrid smoke and fire season held off to the first of September.
And recently, this happened:
Just imagine the feeling of relief, the sheer bounteousness of walking outdoors without a wide-brim sombrero!
And then it did the unthinkable: it rained hard that night. (But not so hard as to produce puddles on the ground, of course.)
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Meanwhile, people who stayed in the Southwest, had a glorious monsoon season.
People like to gush over tourist scenery, that is, the freakish, the vertical, and the red. It doesn't matter to tourists that those features are utterly useless.
I think clouds of the right type should get the glory. Why are clouds so under-rated? Perhaps it is because you can find interesting clouds just about anywhere on planet Earth.
A dramatic sky isn't far, far away at some exotic locale. It doesn't require a vacation to see. Nor does it provide an excuse to spend a lot of money.
The drama of the sky seems disconnected from the usual patterns of romantic escapism and consumerism. Appreciating the sky is better connected with imagining yourself to transcend the trivial here-and-now, to worship an old Indo-European sky god, and to evanesce into the vastness above.
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She is now retired from the National Parks Service where she worked as a seasonal Ranger. So she was up close a and personal to those Parks that are on the tourist bucket list but she appreciates clouds.
As John Steinbeck said "It is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is not more representative of America than is Disneyland."