I started this chase at 1:30 am. Yes. Since my sleeping schedule wasmessed up, I was pretty much up for good by that time. With a fullmoon out, I decided to do some moonlit landscape photos at MonumentRocks north of Scott City. By the time I got there around 4am, though,the moon was getting very low in the sky. I experimented a bit with"flashlight illumination" of the Monument Rocks formation. Overall, itwasn’t much of a success, as it’s difficult to spread even amounts ofillumination on such a large subject. None of the images turned outall that great to my liking. Sunrise was a little bit better, though,and I got some decent images in the sunrise light.
Fast-forwarding to later in the day…
This was kind of a gamble chase — gambling that there could possibly be anything of interest to photograph in terms of storm structure given the crappy summertime flow regime. It was a gamble that I think paid off, because even though the storms I chased were barely severe, I managed to photograph some interesting storm structure — not necessarily updraft structure per-se, but beautiful, tall, contrasted rain-shafts, impressive rain-foots, and even some small/weak gustnadoes at the leading edge of outflow boundaries. There was a brief moment of excitement north of Colby when two storms were converging on each other, ultimately forming a decent but brief rotating area when the storms converged. At this point, a very nice looking and rather low-to-the-ground wall cloud formed — actually one of the better looking wall clouds I’ve seen all year! It didn’t last long, though, and evolved into an outflow dominant shelf cloud. I photographed probably 6 or 7 different storms over the span of about 3 or 4 hours from northwest of McCook to Atwood to southeast of Colby. I witnessed and reported through SpotterNetwork 3/4" or larger diameter hail on two separate occasions – the largest hail witnessed being a piece just barely larger than a quarter just west of Atwood on the back edge of a storm. I also saw a bunch of small, short-lived gustnadoes along an outflow boundary southeast of Colby. I got one CG lightning image from the Lightning Trigger and that was it for the entire day from a lightning standpoint. I got back home just after midnight — thus concluding my nearly 24-hour chase day! I slept for 13 hours after that Below are a few images from the chase: