We started in Winner, South Dakota, and went up to the I-90. Got a Raider Burger and headed west. In Murdo we turned into the parking lot of a motel to check the internet. We read the Stormtrack forum and saw that Verne Carlson had written that he was in Murdo near a motel in the shade of a huge wooden billboard structure. We looked out of the window and well, it must be that red car, let's meet!
After chatting we decided to go to the Badlands, hoping storms would fire up and have a special scenic foreground.
We had sunny skies there, almost called it a good bust day, and this wall of cirrus killed the best red sunset photography possibilities, but soon enough I realized this wasn't going to be a double bust at all - squall line!
One of my dreams, shooting lightning over this park, became reality! With still some daylight left, a picturesque shelf cloud approached with pink/orange patches of light flashing all over the cloud, sometimes CGs. An amazing sight! A bolt out of the anvil ahead of the shelf was caught on photo, I was already happy to see a bright branch of it in my photo, until I saw what Ben got!
We went out of the park onto the I-90, like Paul Austin, and got ourselves into a hail core **4 times**. The first one was worst and ear-deafening with 1-2 cm (around 0.5 inch) stones, the second one was a bit smaller hail but piled up like 5 cm deep. Eventually we got out 10 miles ahead of the squall line near Hwy 283. We ended the day again in the same motel in Winner, not full at all there. A wonderful day! I'll post some pictures later.
