Would like to hear from you guys that are familiar with the monsoon season.....does it normally carry through the month of September? Can you expect thunder storms every evening? Have been reading that this year will be a wetter monsoon season than normal because of an ElNino. Do you hunt through the thunder storms or just forget the evening hunt if they are calling for severe weather that day?
It's already started in N CO. Thunderstorms every afternoon. Usually in September the rain clears and we have a nice evening hunt after the wind settles. But one year it rained for like 8 days straight. The bottom of my Goretex pants mildewed and our boots were wet the whole time.
Ron, I bivi hunted for mule deer near Crested Butte a few year ago during the first two weeks of the archery season until Sept 15, at 11,000. Every few days 3-4, a thunderstorm would show its ugly head with rain/hail and lightening. I had to head down the mountain 1000 ft to the truck camp and hold up a day or two. Usually following the storm, the mt tops and especially the valleys would be cloaked in fog the next morning.
I did not experience a thunderstorm every night but sometime 2-3 days in a row.
Hunt during the storm?lightening?. NO, I wait for better times as hard as that can be.
lol...Wish guys would understand that the rains we get now aint the type of weather we will get in September. Tropical storms off Mexico or off California change our weather patterns. And the rains we are getting is too late to really help us out much. It's been a dry year, yellow grasses, dried up ponds and low running streams, which mean the deer and elk will scattered a lot. For some reason, the storms we usually get out of Az and Utah are staying west and north of us, and while we are getting rain, we don't get it every evening. last fall was miserable down here with the rains, and yessir, the elk harvest was very low. You just couldn't hunt cause of the heavy, constant rains.
In the 14 days I was hunting in Co by Gunnison last september it rained every day but a couple. Opening day we got hit by a 2 hour soaker that even made my bones wet. lol
Yeah, last year was miserable. Actually scary some days with lightning and big wind in all that beetle killed timber. Twelve straight days of rain. I never did dry out.
I saw a news story this morning that there were two deaths from lightening strikes this past weekend. I think both were in RMNP. Lightening in the high country is serious business for sure.
I forgot about those soaking days last year! However, its nothing like rain in VA if you are wondering.
The storms usually come through in afternoon, so evenings are generally really good to hunt. the rain is nothing like VA where it can rain for days. Usually it rains for 5 minutes to maybe a couple hours if its "bad".
Actually, the rains last September was the way I remember September being in the 80's and early 90's. I can remember seeing the black powder hunters sitting in camp cause it was raining too hard for them to hunt, and getting 4" to 6" of snow mid September, even down here in town. Our weather patterns have been changing, and right now, it seems our seasons are a month behind. We have aspens that are just now budding, our chockcherries are the size of peas, and the acorns just a lil bit bigger then peas...
The monsoon is highly variable, not only year to year, but day to day and week to week. And within the months in the monsoon season, September is the most variable. It can be bone dry and/or soaking wet.
The ENSO (El Nino) impacts the monsoon, but so do about 10 other documented occillations. Some enhance, and some dampen the monsoon. In addition, tropical storms and fronts/lows change everything up with the monsoonal pattern.
From my experience, a late start to the monsoon generally means a wet September. Last year was an exception for sure, the early hunt was hot and dry, the later hunt wetter than heck, so who knows?
At any rate, there is no way to accurately predict given all the factors and the high variability, so plan for hot, dry, rainy, cold, and snowy. You might get one or all, and what you experience, might be completely different from what the guy two miles away experiences.