July 13th, 2019. Regina, Sk.

Published on December 12, 2019

Saturday, July 13th was kind of a surprise for us, as we woke up in Bismarck, ND that morning. The reason we woke up there was that models on Friday were showing multiple supercells firing up across Western, North Dakota with a fairly significant tornado potential, so we packed our overnight bags, and hit the road so we could be in a good position for the following day.

Well low and behold we wake up Saturday morning, have our morning coffee and start looking at the latest model runs, and what do you know? They have all shifted everything North into Saskatchewan! so here we go, packing up our bags, and heading back across the border!

We Cross the border at Portal, SK and continue making our way towards Weyburn, where we plan to stop and have some lunch and take another look at the models, When we get to Weyburn we sit down at the local A&W, Eat our meals, and check the models, so far everything is looking good, We pick Assiniboia as our Target, and hit the road.

As we are heading west towards Assiniboia, I start noticing some Towering Cumulonimbus in my mirror, I pull over and there is a Beautiful looking supercell with a nice anvil and overshooting top off in the distance, I take a look at Radar and this Cell is sitting directly over Portal (Where we had just crossed a couple of hours earlier) and was heading into North Dakota, After sitting there for a few minutes Humming and Hawing, I decided there was no way we were going to be able to catch up to that storm, so we continued our way towards Assiniboia.

About 20 Minutes after deciding to continue to Assiniboia, a Friend sends me the following photo from Twitter.

This photo was taken in Portal, That storm i was Humming and Hawing about ended up producing a Beautiful White EF-0 Tornado, That hurt!

After dusting the dirt off my knees, we arrived in Assiniboia where we found a nice field approach to sit in for an hour or two and take a timelapse of the storms firing up.

After a couple of hours, we finally saw a strong storm firing up to the south, Near Macworth, so we hit the road, hoping to intercept this storm near Rockglen.

Once we arrived in Rockglen we were met with a Supercell that was attempting to Mature, so we decided to stick with it. This supercell formed multiple wall clouds but never any funnels, but come sunset it created an absolutely stunning scene with a stacked pancake look lit up pink by the setting sun, over and old run-down highway in the middle of nowhere, Saskatchewan

As the sunset, we decided to head towards Regina where we would stay the night, but on our way there we started noticing an unknown monster being lit by the lightning in the distance, from our position we could see what looked like a massive supercell and wall cloud that looked better and better with every strike of lightning, and as we got closer we knew we had to pull over to take some shots of this thing!

We found a gravel road about 2 miles South of Regina that we could pull off on to set up our cameras, when we hopped out of the vehicle we were greeted with that all too familiar feeling of millions of mosquitos swarming us, the itching began almost instantly but we didn’t care, we knew we needed to shoot this storm.

So we set up our cameras and started shooting while kicking our uncovered legs like horses (it was hot, so we were wearing shorts) for likely close to an hour, By the time we got back in the vehicle we were covered head to toe in millions of mosquito bites, we continued our way to the hotel in downtown Regina, Scratching our bites the entire way, but when we got to the hotel and started editing photos we saw that it was worth it!

Below are a few of my photos from this storm.

– Jordan Carruthers