Always When You Don't Have A Camera Handy...

Gah! Caught without my camera on a beautiful storm! Last night (6/10), one of my buddies picks me up to head to Wood River, IL, so that we can play a trivia game at a local Applebee's. This is about 9:00 pm, so our light sources are pretty much city lights and lightning. We go pick up another friend and begin our drive to the restaurant. Right over the river, near the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in Alton, IL, I see a distinctive lowering in the cloud base. I was suspicious, so I call my dad to give a heads up that this storm may try to pop a wall cloud. I later hear that a wall cloud was reported at our location by a trained spotter, just about the same time I called my dad. We were pretty late for trivia (20 minutes late, as time is now 9:20pm), so we decide to take a detour. We go in a loop around Wood River so we can watch the storm. The lightning was just amazing. We had what I call "spider-effect" lightning, which is cloud-to-cloud lightning that spreads out. We also saw a lot of cloud-to-ground. It was great!

Finally, we start heading back towards Wood River, and this time we had no doubt of this lowering. A textbook wall cloud was hanging over the refinery. I know it would have been difficult to get a picture even if I had my camera, but this was a picture perfect wall cloud. I couldn't tell if it was rotating, due to the lack of light. This was right around 9:30 pm. This wall cloud dissapated after after 5-10 minutes. By time we got to the restaurant, it was gone.

The irony to this whole night: I was about to grab my camera as I left, just in case we ran across some interesting storms!