"Desert Monsoon"

Yes, those are cacti being pummeled by rain.  It actually rains in the
desert, and with some surprising force.  This image depicts a typical
monsoon storm that hits the Arizona desert in the late summer.  These
storms sweep in quickly and are gone about as fast.  The amount of water
they leave behind is quite astounding sometimes.  Flooding of shallow
ravines is common, while the winds of the monsoon can become fierce.  I was
going to put plants flying through the air, but I thought that they must
have figured a way to stay in the ground or they wouldn't survive the
annual storms.  Or I just ran out of time.

The scene was created on an AMD K5-133 with 64 MB ram using LightWave 5.0.
Nothing special was used to model the objects for the scene, but
displacement mapping was used to create the landscape in case you were
curious.