TECHNICAL DETAILS
Sony A7ii with Sony Zeiss 16-35 f4 T* lens.
1/60 at f/8. ISO 100. 16mm focal length. Hand held.

SNOW DOWNBURST ON THE HIGH PLAINS NEAR WINNEMUCCA, NEVADA
I’ve been very fortunate to see a number of spectacular meteorological phenomena over the years: tornados, wall clouds, mammatus and lenticular clouds, the aurora, and others. But November 16th, 2016, on the high plains outside of Winnemucca, Nevada, ranks as the top from a pure visual impact standpoint.

Driving across I80 through Nevada, I had been racing in and out of snow squalls all day. Earlier, in Idaho and northern Nevada, the conditions had been downright treacherous, even with the four wheel drive. It didn’t help that I was pulling my sister’s camper. I was out of the heavy snow at the time, but it was cold, getting late in the day, and my mind was more on where I was going to camp for the night than on the weather, which I thought was mostly behind me, snow-wise.

The low-angle winter sun on the plains and wide-open spaces of Nevada is pretty special to see under normal circumstances. The diffuse winter light, the dryness and warm hues of the landscape at this time of year, both combine for special visuals. Somewhere west of Golconda, I80, there heading northwest, makes a left-hand 90-degree turn to the southeast and Winnemucca. And on the downhill side, just before that turn, is a huge, open expanse of plain, miles across, rimmed by mountains on a couple of sides. As I came down this stretch I saw before me forming over this great open basin a huge wall cloud, moving toward the southeast and almost straight at me. Though it was miles and miles away, I was immediately struck by the size of this cell, and the glowing late-day light hitting it. I had to consider fast how to shoot, and as luck would have it, within a minute ran across an exit for a rest stop.

I wondered at first if it was going to drop rain or snow, but a glance at the temperature as I pulled into a parking spot at the rest area showed the temperature in the low 20s Fahrenheit. It struck me as unusual to see such a powerful storm in low temperatures. Usually I associate warm, convective activity with the type of wall cloud I was watching.

I had a long lens on the Sony A7ii, and sat in the driver’s seat wondering how this storm and the timing of the light was going to play out as I switched to my widest angle, the 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss. Then, a few flurries kicking up ahead of the storm, the light changed and I could see for the first time the most dramatic downburst I’ve ever witnessed. The outflow from the storm looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud, only the flow was in reverse. The light had changed enough that the outflow on the left was perfectly side-lit, and, lens change complete, I ran out of the car and over to the edge of the parking area to shoot. I’m sure a few truckers who were parked at the rest stop thought I was insane the way I sprinted, but I knew that the conditions were rapidly changing and the light could go away at any moment.

Widening the lens all the way out, I started shooting, I bracketed like crazy, framed every way I could think of, and just kept pushing the shutter release. At the time I started shooting, the storm was probably a couple of miles or so away across the plain, but soon, it was bearing down directly on the rest area. The flurries picked up, the light faded out in the snow, and shortly after I got back in the car, it was rocked by huge wind gusts and nearly white-out conditions. The total elapsed time from the first exposure I made to the last was three and a half minutes, witnessed by the time stamps on the image EXIF data. Add on maybe two minutes at the beginning to park and change lenses, and the entire span of this event could not have been more than seven minutes end-to-end.

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