This beautiful yet brutally punishing South Dakota supercell unloaded severe winds with embedded destructive hail on Belle Fourche, one of my favorite High Plains towns, at the same time its wildly tiered and eerily colored cloud structure raced from town to the rolling High Plains just to the east of there. This was the sort of storm locals will talk about for decades for its terrible effects, and observers will recall for its striking appearance, even if it didn’t quite (to our knowledge) produce a tornado. Wisdom teaches spotters and chasers to respect the impacts these storms have on residents, even as we admire their spectacular visual form. In this case, a locally operated, off-highway motel where I stayed the night before (and whose proprietor I called when the storm was exiting Wyoming to alert her this was incoming) experienced tremendous hail damage.
