Last few days of July MAY offer up a chase day or two locally… nothing terribly high-end, but close enough to home to where it could certainly get me on the road.  I had today on the radar, and while it still sits there, the probabilities are definitely toward the bottom.  Overnight showers and a couple thunder rumbles lingered into the morning, and as we approach lunch, the overcast conditions are holding strong here in northern Colorado, greatly reducing any storm potential here.  Out east, a little better, but you’re now talking 2-3 hour drive to get out that way…

Added another tick mark to my tropical adventures… a forgettable one… was mostly mop-up work in Texas on what I assume was the very remote off-chance SOMETHING would have happened after its unspectacular landfall in Louisiana.  Nothing I personally would’ve even given a second thought, but sometimes the nature of the job calls.  That being said, it was everything we knew it would be, and by everything, I mean literally nothing.  I’ve seen bigger downpours in my shower.  But alas, I was there, it’s another name off the list, nothing bad happened, and it was quick and painless.  I’m home,…

Monsoon returned to northern Colorado this evening and I brought out my lightning trigger and cashed the hell in on it!  The shot above was one of several strikes caught on my Nikon this evening on a very impromptu outing about a third of the way through the Rockies game.  At home with a car in my lap, watching storms fire along the Front Range on radar when they finally started sparking.  I set up north of Johnstown and got some good shots looking west (speaking of composite images haha).  But the shot of the night was a window hand-held…

Shooting lightning, as I’ve mentioned only about a bajillion times in the past, is my favorite aspect of storm chasing.  For me, this was REALLY where I got my start as my first couple summers in Colorado gave me many opportunities to capture lightning as I was still in the infancy of my severe weather career.  Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, all my shooting was done on film cameras, namely a Canon AE-1.  I don’t know exactly when digital SLRs came into the public grasp, but it would be many years before I would get my hands…

The heat of July continues, the doldrums, as we like to call them, and aside from the lightning/hail venture on the first day of the month, there has been ZERO to chase, and I’m not all too upset by it.  The time off has been nice, and I can gradually feel the itch starting to return, but it doesn’t look as if Ma-Nature’s itch to get me out is on the same level.  So… I figured I would look back on the first half of the year and offer up my awards to this point.  I will include the July…

July is my slowest warm-weather chasing month of the entire year… it’s usually my annual intermission; middle of the year, comes in fresh after a busy chasing season, and often requires little mileage investment for anything i do motivate myself to chase.  By the time I hit the first week of July, I am pretty wiped after the main brunt of the chasing season, which I am usually all-in from March through June, so after 4 months and tens of thousands of miles, I am happy and content to pack it in, catch my breath, remember what real life is…