June 26 Itasca County Storm

I returned home from a bicycle ride and saw a nice thunderstorm anvil to the north. A quick check of Radarscope on my phone showed a nice storm moving into northwestern Itasca County. It appeared to develop some rotation and deviant motion, and although it was not warned, I decided to go after it.

I arrived in Deer River with the storm directly to my north. I decided to stop there for viewing because the road options to the updraft base did not look great. The storm was not particularly strong, but it did have quite a bit of intracloud lightning.

 

First view of the storm as I arrived at Deer River.

 

After watching the storm for a bit from Deer River, I followed it east through Grand Rapids to County Road 21 east of Grand Rapids to the south of Trout Lake. I stopped in a couple places to get some lightning shots, but there wasn't that much poking out from the cloud. I did stop along a field to the east of Trout Lake and was able to photograph some lightning-illuminated storm structure.

Lightning-illuminated structure on the storm.

 

I got well east of Grand Rapids on County Road 10 and decided to let the storm pass over me. There was a little bit of pea size hail but nothing severe. After the storm passed, I watched a second storm come in from the northwest and admired the colors at twilight. Upon looking back at the images, I think there may have been some weak noctilucent clouds on the horizon, but I'm not sure about that. It would have been amazing had there been northern lights behind the storms, too. I have never gotten good shots of storms with northern lights, but maybe it will happen some day.

Lightning under a second storm and perhaps some weak noctilucent clouds on the left horizon.

 

The fireflies really started to get active, so I decided to do some firefly photography for a while. Additionally, the lights from one of the small iron range cities was lighting the rain and cloud base a bit, so I decided to photograph that scene.

Lots of fireflies in the fields, and weak artificial lightning illuminating the rain shafts and cloud bases.

 

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