The Great Hailstorm

Nature’s Icy Wrath Descends on Boulder

By Richard Martin, 6-26-06

I was in the pool at RallySport late Saturday afternoon when they closed it down because of lightning in the area. When my family and I exited the locker rooms, we saw what has already entered the rich trove of Boulder Weird Weather Tales: the Great Hailstorm of 2006.

At first it was just horizontal rain pelting down in a stiff gale out of the west. But the rain quickly turned to ice.

With a group of other stranded athletic clubbers we stood in the RallySport lobby and watched it come down with growing amazement. At a 45-degree angle pellets of hail cascaded down, bouncing off car roofs and hoods. I stepped outside, under the metal roof in front of the door, and it sounded like a machine-gun assault. I've seen violent hailstorms before, at 12,000 feet, but nothing like this in town. It was absolutely roaring. The swimming pool looked like it was being roiled by mini-explosions, and the parking lot was covered in minutes with an inch-deep carpet of rounded hailstones.

"I've lived here a long time," said my friend Elizabeth, clutching her one-year-old daughter, "and I've never seen anything like this."

That was the general reaction to the summer hailstorm, which in places dropped baseball-sized hailstones and which wreaked havoc along its narrow path from west to east, basically down the middle of town. Even meteorologist Matt Kelsch, with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told the Daily Camera he'd never seen such an explosive icestorm. It had something wrathful and Old Testament about it, shredding trees of their new green leaves, decimating gardens, and pelting lingering pedestrians.

And it was brief. After 10 minutes the sky was clearing over the foothills and the hail and rain was over. Slightly amazed, we drove through flooded streets to Zolo, and after we ordered dinner they opened the plastic shades on the patio, the sun came out, and the hail melted like it had never happened.

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