After the success of the day prior and the need to torture myself with Football (sigh), I opted to NOT chase the eastern Colorado target, which did go on to produce a long-track hailer supercell, but nothing I was going to lose sleep over. Turns out, after all my Football was done, I would get a backyard secondary play as multiple storms, including a strong (later severe) storm that blew up near western Loveland, which prompted me to throw on pants and head up to my shooting spot about a mile up the road. Most of the lightning was cloud-to-cloud, very few cloud-to-ground strikes, but early on, within the first few shots, I managed to capture the elusive CG strike on this storm.
I had two cameras going, one pointing north and the other pointing west as both areas were busy.
The western core was most active, and I eventually landed both cameras at that scene as I grabbed as many shots as I could ahead of the precip, and likely hail.
As the rain started to move in, I hurried my gear back into the vehicle and decided to make a run at the core. I looped down to Milliken, over to Johnstown, the south on Weld County Road 19, taking a few glancing stones there, but with the storm moving southeast right at Platteville, that’s where I headed, rolling in about ten minutes ahead of the core.
The initial round came with hail that approached 1″, but was mostly wind and rain. The heavier core, the one blanketing the ground, was about a mile north, so hopped up that mile and got into the good stuff.
Up until this point, the storm was unwarned, but an orange polygon was put out for this storm, hail up to 1.25″. I saw nothing that big, and in fact, I would say MAYBE an inch in the early stuff, but most was nickel or less, but as usual here in Colorado, enough to whiten things up.
Once the storm moved on, I documented some of the hail-covered aftermath, then made the trek up US-85 and back home.
Easy peasy! More lightning shots to pad the Summer 2026 portfolio, and a bonus little hailer to put on TV to start the new workweek.
