Day 9 Summary:
Nothing exciting really to report yesterday. We took another leisurely drive south through the western Black Hills… through Newcastle… eventually ending up in Lusk. There were no storms of interest to chase yesterday… just weak convection over the mountains of the Laramie Range. It was quite hazy/smokey through the drive to Lusk…especially on the southern horizon. We got to Lusk fairly early in the evening… I used this extra time for a little R&R if you will… listened to the Royals baseball game over streaming audio while watching a movie on TV (Forrest Gump was on)… completely unrelated… the Royals are on a 5-game winning streak, so that was a positive 
Vince drove over to Van Tassel which is a "town" of about 18 souls. He did some sunset time lapse stuff over some of the interesting rock formations that reside just north of Van Tassel. With a full moon, we realized this might be a nice opportunity for moonlight landscape photography with these rock formations — so we set out 20 miles east of Lusk to Van Tassel late in the evening after the sun set with the full moon rising higher in the sky. We captured some nice images a couple miles north of Van Tassel… this place reminds me of The Monument Rocks… very nice rocks/pillars sticking out of the earth which offer for interesting compositions. My 12mm ultra wide angle focal length allowed for me to get the full Big Dipper in a couple of these shots. Some notes/recommendations: Lusk is a nice, quaint little town, with a population of about 1500… comparable to the size of Greensburg, KS. The place we stayed at was small, affordable, and quite clean called the Town House Motel. If you like pizza, try "The Pizza Place" right in downtown… it’s pretty popular in town and gets busy… but the pizza is pretty darn good.
Day 10… right now:
We are on our way home. We were watching the potential for a chase opportunity up over northeast Wyoming with some northeast winds with decent moisture… but this wasn’t panning out as well as we would like, so we said to heck with it and decided to begin the 500 mile drive back. It’s incredibly hazy/smokey still as I type entering Scottsbluff County, Nebraska. Even though the past few days have been lackluster in the storm department, this trip has been quite rewarding. Now over the next week I’ll begin processing a bunch of photos for my online gallery… so look for a continued update of additional images over the rest of this summer!.