Yesterday afternoon a camp friend and I noticed a strange, dense patch of clouds to the northwest, hanging over the Mojave Desert.  It was an oddly tight mass of cloud, taking up no more space than I could cover with my hand outstretched sideways – in an otherwise clear, bright blue sky – except for a thin scraggly cloud that looked like a random release of something from a plane, so small I could cover it with a finger.  Just that fine little thing to the north and the tight mass to the northwest, moving slowly our way in an otherwise bright blue clear sky.  I regret that I didn’t photograph the cloud’s approach, because in the matter of twenty minutes, it had broken into similarly sized, and even similarly shaped, pieces which nearly filled the sky and remained overhead for hours.

A year or more later, I watched a Dutch Sinse video on global earthquakes, in which he referred to past and current events that release gases into the air – and he mentioned specifically a valley northwest of Quartzsite in which the odd gas formations were seen on Google Earth video!  I believe this is what we witnessed here.