2 very unwelcome guests and a learning experience

The weather here in Lakewood, NM is sunny, hot, and very windy.  The mornings are magnificent though.  For those of you sleep-iners, that's the time from a bit before sunrise until noonish.:)  It's cool and quiet and beautiful.  With that in mind we left yesterday at about 0530am, a little before sunrise to explore an area to the west of Carlsbad Caverns.  We have been in this area before, in fact, I have been into the caverns twice and Jan isn't comfortable in caves, so the Caverns isn't in our plans this trip.  We wanted to get off road, one of our favorite things to do and see how the new Jeep handles it.  We took a fantastic 165 mile loop with about 70 miles of it off road.  The Jeep is superb, the air suspension that allows you to raise it up to clear obstacles is awesome!
Anyway as we are making our way just after sunrise I see a dark blob on the road ahead.  It took a moment for it to register, turn back and take a picture, yeah only a picture, of one of my favorite creatures, a Desert Tarantula, NOT!

We continued on and kept climbing in altitude to the 6000' range which kept the temps fantastic.  We saw beautiful scenery.....

Lots of mule deer, a big eared Jack Rabbit......

And the crowning event, one we did NOT get out of the Jeep for, a big Western Diamondback rattler, of which the guide book succinctly puts, "bites can be fatal"..

All in all we had a great day, a nice drive, a bit of walking about, and some interesting creatures.

About dinner time some weather started to move into the area.  We were watching the radar on our phones and a severe thunderstorm watch was raised for the area we are in.  It looked to me that it would just miss us to the west.  All of a sudden we start hearing loud booms, one after the other!  We didn't know what it could be, we go outside, go up and down the street trying to figure it out?  Pretty soon a lady across the way, who must have seen us looking puzzled, came out to tell us what we hearing were "hail cannons".  Seems the pecan farmers fire these cannons to prevent hail from forming that could ruin their crop.  I was a bit incredulous, but this lady assured me that for the many years she had been here, that whenever the cannons were fired they had experienced no hail!  I was a bit amazed and searching through my meteorological training and understanding I could not picture how firing a very loud cannon could have any effect on hail.  Well, on searching the internet, seems they have been using cannons for this purpose since 1901!  And, although there is no scientific proof that it works or can work, the believers swear it is effective and continue to use them.  It is impossible to prove yes or no evidently.  So it continued about every 3-4 seconds for an hour, and we had no hail!  Must work, huh?