Fire and ice up north.

Today was a test chase to see how my truck was running.  So far so good but I still need to bring it in to get the transmission checked out.  I needed to get out of the office and do a test run chase on my gear today to work out any issues and get back into spring and summer chase mode vs. winter blizzard chase mode. 

I headed up north towards the Brainerd area and Lake Mille Lacs area as the storms were firing but racing off towards Duluth.  It was a cool light show but I gave up on following them as they headed towards Pine County.  You can’t chase in Pine County due to all the Pine Tree’s and is just as bad as chasing in Western Wisconsin.

So I headed back for the second round of storms that was heading towards Lake Mille Lacs and just sat and waited for the light show.  The storms were pretty sweet to watch but they were also very outflow dominate when they moved into the area.  Outflow for those of you non weather geeks is when the storm is starting to fall apart and all the air that went up comes crashing back down.  And that is when you get a wind storm / dust storm like I was in up on the north west side of lake Mille Lacs as strong winds raced across the lake and came racing onto shore and blew a ton of sand and debris around.  It looked pretty cool but I could not get out and setup any cameras because they would have just been blown over. 

After the wind calmed down I got out and along the side of highway 169 on the north side of town and shot some stills of the lightning.  The stills are not the greatest if your looking for wicked lightning hitting the ground since the lightning was all cloud to cloud.  But what is cool is that I got the heads up from Tim Marshall via Facebook that there was still ice on Lake Mille Lacs and with a thunder storm over frozen lake shore, that was going to make for some interesting shots. 

It was not a impressive chase or deadly chase, it was a chase were I was able to pull off something that is almost impossible because it’s pretty rare to get lightning with snow or a huge lake like Mille Lacs that still had a lot of ice on it in, in the photographs.    I know I could have done a lot better video and stills and got closer to the storm when it did have a lot of cloud to ground lightning when it was west of Brainerd but I was able to now say I photographed lightning with snow / ice covering the lake in the same shot.   

Lightning photograph over Mille Lacs Lake with ice still covering the lake. © Doug Kiesling

Oh and before I forget, the air temp was about 70-75F outside, until I was along county road 18 at the beach on the north side of the lake.  The outside air temp (OAT) was 46F as the wind raced over the near freezing water and frozen ice.  That’s about a 30F temp drop in less then a couple of miles.  But there were no bugs out .