Friday 30th August 2013 - Fountain Hills (Az)

And so the bonus chase day was upon us and we really did not need to go far today, in fact total mileage was around 35 miles today. We headed east at 3pm from the Hotel to a nice line of Bubbling Cumulus to our North West pretty much near Fountain Hills, so off we went to our new favourite spotting location, once there the storm we had been watching was sitting pretty much about 5 miles to our North West, we also met up with brilliant Arizona photographer Brian Snider who was timelapsing this event a stones thrwo down the path from us.

Things were also starting to take shape to our South and we watched a boundary forming with a very long line of explosive updraughts in an area from Apache Junction to near Casa Grande. And we really had an amazing view to watch this from about 10 miles further back in Fountains Hills itself, a great viewpoint we stumbled across in 2011.

And when we got there the view above was breath-taking, we could see all the way across the valley this now severe warned storm spitting out Cg Lightning over the habitats of Mesa and Apache Junction directly to our south and Tempe and Chandler to our South West. This storm would go onto produce severe damage in Apache Damage caused by a Microburst - See Picture Below

Unfortunately all the Lightning moved away towards Florence as darkness fell so no Cg shots in the valley below for us but it did create a stunning sunset to our west over the mountains of NE Phoenix, a fitting end to a great trip monsoon chasing in 2013.