One of my personal favorite images of 2018 was this one early in the morning of July 21st on the Vekol Valley Road overpass looking east. Asher and I had gone almost all the way to New Mexico earlier, and then raced back towards home as a huge MCS blew up and started blasting west and northwest. We raced ahead of it here and had only a few minutes to setup before it blasted us again with strong winds, dust and rain.
It’s rare (to me) for these kinds of MCS storms in the desert to move fast and have so much cloud-to-ground lightning as well. It’s usually in cloud, back in the rain…so this night was such a treat. This is just a single exposure, around 20-25 seconds…and lightning was exploding everywhere. It was an intense barrage for hours, ones I like to call “widow makers” because they just seemed fast and deadly.