July 3, 2025 Storms

North Dakota

This ended up being not that dramatic of a day, but there were some interesting highlights. We left Spearfish headed for someplace north. It looked like we would have to get into North Dakota, so we didn't really waste any time in the southern end of the slight risk area. We drove north to Bowman and had lunch there.

Storm Prediction Center 1630 UTC Day 1 convective outlook with verification.

Storm Prediction Center 1630 UTC Day 1 tornado outlook with verification.

Lunch in Bowman was rather interesting. Given that the town was rather small, I thought that we didn't want to overwhelm any lunch spot with three vans full of people, so I told the other two vans in our tour to pick among a couple restaurants in town. I saw one just south of town about a mile that had some pretty good review on Google. I looked at the place on the satellite view in Google Maps, and I noticed something a little odd. It looked like feedlot pens just outside this place. Maybe I wasn't seeing the imagery correctly.

We drove into the parking lot as the other vans continued to their lunch spots. The parking lot was empty except for a couple vehicles, which I guessed must be employees of the restaurant. This is usually not a good sign. I gave the guests a look to see any expressions on their faces indicating anxiety or disapproval, but they simply said, "Maybe we're the first ones here." That was not enough to get me to reverse my decision to eat here.

We got out of the van, and the air we stepped into was filled with the scent of cow manure. This was strike two. I was not liking my choice of restaurants right now, but this still did not make me back off. I thought the place surely would have a ventilation system that filtered out the manure smell, so I opened the door and went inside.

The manure smell only intensified inside the building. This time, I thought, "Okay, we can just turn around and go now." However, the staff spotted us and greeted us warmly, and I felt too guilty to just turn around and leave. It turns out this was a cattle auction facility with an attached kitchen/restaurant facility that operates primarily when there is an auction. Today, there was no auction, so the place was empty except for the employees. Opposite the main entrance to the room was the entrance to the auction arena. That's where the smell was coming from. There were quite a few flies buzzing around, too.

About half of us ate our lunch there. One of our group was vegetarian, so that person decided just to wait for a pit stop later in the afternoon. I think about half of our group actually ate a meal. I had a burrito, and it was actually decent, but not a typical Mexican restaurant burrito

After we finished, we drove to a truck stop in town to wait for the others to finish their lunch. The rest stop served ice cream and snacks, and we could pit stop there until storms developed. It turns out the men's bathroom was out of toilet paper. One of us didn't notice before they used the stall and had to wait for staff to throw some over the stall wall.

A guest on our tour eats his lunch in the cattle auction arena.

Anyway, now that all the weirdness was past us, we went looking for storms. We continued north to Watford City. On the way, we saw some very narrow, tilted updrafts that became turkey towers. These did not look promising, but when we got to Watford City, some more promising updrafts developed.

Tilted updrafts.

The tilted updrafts get bigger but still don't look promising.

Some storms finally started to develop near Watford City.

Storm developing west of Watford City.

From this point, we had to make a decision. There was a large gap in the road network because of the large reservoir to our east. We could stay north and get to a closer crossing of the Missouri River, but if storms develope farther south (there were some updrafts that way), we would be out of position. If we went south and the closer storms ended up being the best, we'd have to spend a lot of time dashing back north. We elected to take the northern option.

Storms were slow to intensify. This is looking south, crossing the Missouri River.

We crossed the river, and the storm began to intensify. We took a quick pit stop in New Town, and the storm started spitting out quite a few cloud-to-ground lightning bolts. This is often a good sign, so I was starting to get excited for our prospects. We continued east into some more open area to find a spot and observe the storm as it intensified, but intensify it did not. It turns out the peak of the storm's strength was when we were at our pit stop in New Town. Thereafter, it weakened very slowly. It took nearly two hours before we finally decided to give up and head for a hotel in Bismarck.

Radar image of our new storm.

We made a quick pit stop in New Town. This was as strong as the storm got.

The storm is dying a slow death.

Last image of the storm.

We drove to Bismarck to stay the night. The storm we intercepted was a bit of a disappointment. Overall, there were some stronger storms to the south, but those did not get particularly interesting, either. The activity was simply slow to intensify during the evening, and it seemed like most of the show was after sunset.

This is the route we took.

Back to Storm Chases | Home