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Not wanting to stick around any longer than I had to(needed to get on the road since my motel was a good hour away yet) I thought, oh yeah, I can just stop the lens down and probably get the blur now. So that's what I did. This one was shot at F13, 100 ISO, for 47 seconds.
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Same as the above settings, but 81 seconds this time.
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This one is noisy as I tried to freeze the sky more, to show things closer to what they looked like(though a bit brigher than reality). I used F4, 1600 ISO, for just 1 second. Why did I bother doing this? Well, I noticed something that looked like maybe, just maybe, it was a base of an updraft. You can see one just left of the tower, and a better example much closer to the left edge of the image. They were just different than all the other clouds, and at one point looked like a very skinny, very elevated shelf, though not that long. I knew what very well could be above them. Updrafts. How nuts would that be though, manage lightning, behind the line of convection that already moved east through here, at twilight, and it be located RIGHT over Devil's Tower and only there....and I'm still here! It's freaky, really.
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I called Steve to see where he wound up and if the storms were worth much into SD(one wound up tornado warned near Spearfish, right after I let them go). While talking with him I noticed a flicker off to my left. I was like, did that just produce lightning? A few moments later, cg! I about crapped. I let Steve go right away. The rest quickly unfolded. For the next 10 minutes, I was shooting stills, covering my mouth with my hand and yelling(literally). I was 100% amazed at what was happening, largely because of how nuts it seemed, and how unlikely.
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Before I put the rest of the images up, here is a radar grab from this timeframe. I've drawn in the arrow pointing to exactly where Devil's Tower is located. It's just past the tip of the arrow. The line to the east is now weakening and is no longer severe. This small area over me had just formed, right after sunset and lasted only 20-30 minutes or so.
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Less than a minute after the previous shot, this one hit right behind the tower. For those that wonder, it was F6.3, 100 ISO, 16 seconds long. One thing I didn't want, was a close cg to hit and blow out the shot, because I had the aperture too open. Being down at 100 ISO would help, but even with that, I wasn't sure F6.3 would be small enough. I saw it hit, quickly looked at it on the lcd, and was so happy it wasn't blown out. I started to count after the flash of a few of these, so I'd know if they were within a mile(5 seconds for each mile). The thunder from this was less than that. Most cgs were at this point. All the images are wide angle, at 17mm, so they look further away than they actually were.
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Here is a link to see a full sized crop out of the previous photo. Right click and open it in a new window. Then click on "all sizes", then click "original" towards the top of the page. That shows a 100% crop of a portion of the shot. I didn't really want to put that copyright thing across it, but am still paranoid about posting anything very large like that. And yes I'm aware some can remove them anyway(have been e-mailed my own stuff with that done to them to show me how silly it is...didn't work I guess). Anyway, if only that bolt had hit this side of the tower! I know I know, be happy this freak show even happened and that I was still there.
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As many cg's as I was having with the tower, there were likely 5 times as many directly south of me(behind me). Some of them were extremely close. I looked at the time on these images. From first to last bolt was 7 minutes(of the ones I shot obviously). I was getting one with the tower, in the shot, right at about every minute. The frequency of them all, was really very high. It's amazing that they were coming from such garbage too. They weren't quite staccato but they were very short duration flashes.
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I think the lighting on the foreground to the left was from a car driving by. I'm not sure though, as only 1 or 2 drove by. Also, some of the bolts right behind me were close and bright, enough you could see the flash off the rock of the tower. Actually I just noticed something on this one. The left side of the tower is lit up some too. Maybe it was the bolt. Then again this cloud to air bolt could do that, and a car could be going by doing that to the foreground. I'm just not sure.
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The last shot from this wonderful encounter. It started to rain on me, so I opted to drive up to the tower, not realizing it was supposed to be "closed" up there. The rain from these wasn't very wide and I thought I could get out of it, which I largely did. My other hope was I could get some of the lightning happening to my southeast. The road swings around the tower, so it would put it more in the shot with those. There were just too many trees though, and the lightning display was already starting to wind down. On the way up, I got my bearings completely screwed up. I felt like I was driving due north, but my gps said I was going straight south at the time. I tried and tried to flip it in my mind, but it wasn't happening and it was driving me crazy. I will say, it was highly spooky up there next to Devil's Tower, in the dark, lightning going on, and not a soul to be found(after some security guy or something, shined his spotlight on me as he left the parking area. It still didn't dawn on me till later that it was closed). At this time I gave Randy Chamberlain a call, to see if he was chasing the next day and to see if he could guess where I was parked. That and I was starting to freak myself out, lol. I was like, well if I vanish, my last location was an "empty" parking lot, at night, at Devil's Tower. Part way into the conversation my cell phone just drops the call. It didn't say call ended or anything, it just showed the display like it wasn't being used at all. Neither of us were driving, so it was highly odd and not helping my paranoia. I decided to drive back down from there and as I did, I saw the newly formed fog along the road. New, as in it wasn't there 5 minutes ago. I told the Devil thanks and that I was leaving now.
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