High Plains Drifter

…Highly photogenic & vivid lightning outside of Lipscomb, Texas…

at 5:45pm, I really had no idea I would be having probably my finest lightning photography shoot of the year in the next 3 to 4 hours — but that’s what happened.  I got home from work at a quarter after 4 and took a nap for almost an hour and a half!  I woke up, looked at the radar and noticed that a decent storm had formed west of Liberal… moving slowly east.  I figured that since the action was likely going to stay out of the Dodge City forecast area, it was probably okay to skip town since they wouldn’t need extra help at work.  So at 6pm, I took off.  It was another one of these totally spontaneous, impromtu chases with no pre-planning whatsoever.  I just looked at the radar and said “I’m gonna chase this”, and left.  I was originally thinking about going down to Englewood and meet the storms as they moved closer to there, but they were not moving as fast as I thought… so instead of going due south to Englewood, I drove southwest to Meade…then south from there into the Oklahoma Panhandle.  The first storm that developed, which prompted me to go on this chase, ultimately died, but I figured more would form based on short-term model signals and the decent environment with marginal wind shear and pretty good instability.  Another storm formed farther south…along the OK-TX Panhandle border near the town of Booker, TX.  I drove south from Hwy 270 continuing south on Hwy 23 to Booker.  I had to punch the core, but there wasn’t much to it other than a lot of rain and some gusty north winds.  It didn’t take long to get to the other side of this fairly small storm.  I stopped briefly to try to shoot some structure from the southwest side looking northeast… but the structure wasn’t all that great.  The wind was, though, gusting to near 60 mph at times from the north.  It was a chore to keep hold the car door open when I was getting my gear out to shoot.  I went south further to Ranch 3260 and followed it east.  At this point, I wasn’t overly encouraged by the structure of this storm.  Soon, however, as I approached Hwy 305 at Lipscomb, I noticed some increased development in the front updraft flank of the storm.  I wanted to find a good high spot to pull off and just observe things for awhile.  I did this just east of Lipscomb on a paved county road (County Road T) about a mile or two east of town.  For the next hour, at this same location, I watched a storm develop quite nice updraft structure… only to eventually go on to put on a spectacular and mesmorizing cloud-to-ground lightning show that I would photograph with the lightning trigger.  I went from thinking that this was a stupid evening driving exercise in futility — to damn glad I decided to make this run — in a span of about 20 minutes!  It was so much fun to just sit there and photograph this storm and the associated lightning from the same spot.  Below are 9 images from this awesome one-hour moment in time: