We started the day where we left off in Ogallala, NE. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired saying this towns name, Ogallala or as Jen and I have renamed it, Ogallalalala. We started off by doing a bit of sight seeing in the town. Our first stop after breakfast was this old Mansion on the Hill Museum. A turn of the century farm house, that was lavishly decorated by 1890’s standards. A little further down the road we visited Boot Hill, a cemetery filled with unknown graves. Back in the 1860’s and 1870’s cow hands, bandits, law men and others found themselves on the wrong side the gun and many were buried here in this wild-west cemetery. Back in town we visited the Front Street row of business where we ate lunch, visited a museum with some interesting artifacts and planned for our up and coming storm chase! After all, we had lots of time to kill while the atmosphere baked. What’s fascinating about Nebraska, and many other states which sit on the front range, a sort of geographic plateau where the land rises about 1000 – 1500 meters above sea level, is how diverse the geography really is. The front range suddenly rises, then flattens out into gentle rolling hills and large open plains. You can have pancake like flatness as far as the eye can see and then you’ll suddenly run into amazing hills, canyons and gorges with amazing rock formations. I first encountered this diverse landscape in the Texas Panhandle, specifically the Cap Rock, which shares the same type of geography as Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming. Even while I was actively heading towards the storms, Jen and I had to stop and take some photos of these wonderful rock structures. We also passed a controlled burn, but I was pretty sure it was one of those controlled burns, that was becoming a little uncontrolled if you know what I mean.   The pair of supercells crossing the border from Wyoming into Nebraska finally came into view near Scottsbluff. The southern storm has the illusion of a ground hugging wall cloud thanks to a little hill while the northern storm had a very cold and elevated look to it with tons of low level dust being kicked up. Neither storm looked all that threatening and the rotation with both storms remained broad never really tightening up. As both storms tracked east-southeast paralleling U.S Route 92 they passed through Scotts Bluff National Monument Park. The storms, against the towering bluffs made for some impressive high contrast photos, the kind of stuff you don’t normally see! The southern cell also produced a little inflow area with low hanging scud right above the Chimney Rock Monument. Just gorgeous stuff to see! Both storms did hold on for a while but eventually as the evening took over and the airmass cooled they lost their energy. The southern cell became very linear and blew out while the northern cell, shriveled up died. The southern storm cell did produce a very pretty sunset image with a plethora of wispy rain. Up under the storm it was packing some 40 MPH winds and kicked up some dust in a field just to my east. I was looking but saw no rotation above, so I would not even call this a gustnado feature. The storm did produce a fair bit of lightning and I was able to grab this evening lightning photo. It’s not easy to shoot lightning when the daylight over powers the flashes but this one turned out! We’re now spending the night in Sidney, NE seeing as tomorrow looks like an interesting day across northeastern Colorado! Stay turned!