Lookout Mountain provides a scenic view of the town of Golden, Colorado below
There are very few views that are more spectacular than a landscape view of a mountain range. I took this photo the winter that I was living in Denver, Colorado. My soon-to-be wife was visiting, and we drove out to Golden, Colorado to hike up into the mountains. On this hike, we started at the Chimney Gulch trailhead and made our way up to Lookout Mountain. Lookout Mountain is a great place to get a bird’s eye view of Golden, because it looks down on the city from a height of 7,377 feet.
The clouds that you can see in this photo are cumulus clouds. In order to identify these clouds, look to the sky for any clouds that appear to be cotton candy. As they grow upward and continue to darken towards the base, they can develop into cumulonimbus clouds. In the Rocky Mountains—which is where this photo was taken—, you often see cumulus clouds accumulate from the west and slowly form into cumulonimbus clouds to unleash big storms in the mountains in the early afternoon.
Golden, Colorado like much of Colorado is known for its cloud free days. You can expect to have 115 clear days in a given years. In that same year, you will have 130 partly clouds days. Partly cloudy is defined by the National Weather Service as cloud cover over more than 30 percent and less than 80 percent. Anything above 80 percent is considered cloudy. Golden has about 120 cloudy days per year. If you count the number of days that the sun comes out for at least one hour (instead of following the definitions defined by the National Weather Service), then this little mountain town experiences around 300 days of sunshine per year. This puts Golden, Colorado up there with some of the most sunny days in the United States.
Golden, Colorado like much of Colorado is known for its cloud free days. There can be up to 300 days per year with sunshine!
Did you know?
- Cumulus clouds are individual clouds.
- These clouds have flat bases and can grow to be very large.
- Cumulus clouds start at around 1,000 feet and can extend to over 39,000 feet. That means one cloud could be more than 38,000 feet tall!
- There are four subforms of cumulus clouds: humilis, mediocris, congestus, and fractus.
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