It was the best (or worst, if that's how you feel) lightning storm I can remember being in.

It felt strange to be out classifying without heelers. But the route I didn't finish on Monday is along the drive home from office town, so Tuesday evening I pulled off the highway and got some field work done.

First stopped off at my friend's log cabin, the one with the big new addition they made to go with the addition to the family, and dropped off a name and phone number for him.

Our state's West Nile Virus coordinator. He's worried about the owls that nest in their yard.

It was cloudy and rainy most of the drive down, but I could see a big white thundercloud gleaming in the evening sun, so I thought I might end up getting some sunlight to help the classifications.

I was wrong.

Almost lousy light, all the way up Muddy Creek. Finished about ten minutes before sunset, according to the GPS, but you couldn't prove it by looking out the windows.

The new cold front was poised on the crest of the Ferrises, trying to boil down to the south side:

I turned around on the Continental Divide (Yes, the Divide. Hard to explain without a topo map, but the Divide bails off the perfectly steep and tall mountains to go running down some miniscule ridges and dunes out in the desert here.) and watched the storm clouds float in from the west.

Flashing as they came.

Ever tried getting a picture of lightning with a digital camera? When you haven't read the manual to figure out how to set long shutter speeds, and are stuck with the automatic fast shots? And the shutter goes off a second and a half after you push the button?

Frustrating.

Got so I would count the intervals between flashes in the different parts of the cloud bank, and tried to anticipate the next flash.

Didn't work.

Tried spotting a pattern, since the flashes seemed to be concentrated in three different banks of cloud. And guessing which portion would flash next.

Didn't work either.

Even tried the camera's movie function. And caught a nice horizontal flash, without knowing it until I got home.

It was cool, though, sitting up high, watching Thor (or was it Odin?) throwing his toys around down below. With another cloud bank resting itself on the hills behind. And had all the opportunities a person could want for lightning pics. By the time the clouds covered the southern sky, the lightning flashes were nearly continuous. As was the thunder.

I missed the heelers on this trip, but I'm sure they didn't miss the non-stop boomb-a-looms.

But it occurred to me that 1) I had to drive home in that storm and 2) it was coming this way. I did not want to be up here in that, here on the Divide, eight muddy miles from asphalt.

Kept stopping on the drive out, though, trying to get a pic of lightning. And finally got lucky:

Had drenching rain on the drive home (fortunately after I hit the asphalt), the kind where each heavy drop that hits the road bounces a large globule of water back up in the air, like hail.

'Course it all petered out a few miles north of home.