Isolation Antidotes (19): Storm Lake Storm

On August 13, 2016, I had to go to Fergus Falls, Minnesota to pick up our car after its repair following an unfortunate close encounter of the fourth kind with a very large deer and then headed back south to our then home in Omaha. This gave me the opportunity to choose a route that I’d not driven before. There were a few notable events along the way (including a close call with another deer in broad daylight), but the most memorable was what I think must have been the largest storm cloud I’ve ever seen. I first noticed it when I was somewhere north of Pipestone, Minnesota, and I watched it develop and grow…and grow…and grow all the way home, for at least five hours, until the Loess Hills to the north of Council Bluffs, Iowa (just across the state line from Nebraska) finally obscured it. Along the way, I watched carefully for a suitable foreground and stopped once, between Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa, taking a couple of small country roads toward the east, to make this photo. I checked the weather radar app on my phone and determined its location to be between Storm Lake and Fort Dodge (in Iowa). Checking maps when I was finally home, I realized that, when I’d first seen it, it was close to 150 miles away, and when I made this image, probably around 100 miles–yes, Dorothy, it was really that big! At its most mature, it must have reached something around 70,000 feet in altitude. I was very thankful that I was able to observe it casually from afar and that my route home hadn’t taken me anywhere near (or under) it! [Metadata: Nikon D-7000, Nikon 18-135 lens at 80 mm, ISO 500, 1/640 second at f/18]