In the army I was stationed at White Sand Missile Range in New Mexico. Most of the time it is a very dry desert. One day we had to go up-range to launch a missile and it started raining. By the time we got to the launch sight the top two feet of the desert had turned to mud. What fun, slipping and sliding our duce-and-a-halfs and 5-ton trucks in a big muddy playpen almost as much fun as being a kid playing the dirt pile. (I wonder how many modern mothers let there kids turn a corner of the back yard into a dirt pile, we always were trying to dig a hole to china, never did make it.) Anyway back to the desert. The launch got scrubbed. A couple of weeks later we went back to inspect the site for the next try. What a mess! Our nice flat launch site was dry again and all those 2-foot deep ruts were hard as cement. We had to have the engineers go in and bulldoze the sight to get it flat. It was weird, what a couple of hours of rain and the desert was a swamp. A week latter it was all dry except in the low spots. For several months we had lakes in the middle of the desert. The other amazing thing was a lot of the desert turned green, plants sprung up every where.
Scp