The gently rolling shortgrass prairie of western Johnson Mesa, in northernmost New Mexico, is a great vantage for supercells that fire in the Sangre de Cristos just west of Trinidad and roll east or east-southeast, as often happens in late spring to early summer. This well-structured storm, dark and brooding under shadow of its own anvil and some high clouds to the southwest, cut a spectacular profile in the sky and—for a short while—sported a wet, moderately rotating wall cloud that I had to watch closely for signs of a tornado. Moist scud chunks rode the inflow and rafted toward the storm, as if magnetically pulled. The supercell moved east several miles, then weakened without any noticeable spinups. Thanks to terrain and road gaps, supercells in this position are pretty much viewable only from the south or southwest on this high mesa (looking past Horseshoe and Fisher’s Mesas in the distance), and to the northeast, US-160 in Colorado, which often looks down their forward flanks. The deep towers behind this storm would result in another supercell, tracking behind and on about the same path as this one, but ultimately lasting a little longer and farther eastward.
9 E Raton NM (5 Jul 23) Looking NW
36.9172, -104.2777