What an amazing Saturday!

Here is the text to go with the pictures from yesterday.

I just saw the most amazing storm structure I might ever see in my life.

Yesterday was a day without much expectation. There was a strong cap over most of South Dakota and by 4:30 pm it didn't seem like that cap was going to break anytime soon. That's when we noticed a tower going up to our northwest. One tower after another continued funneling into the storm and it quickly began to strengthen on radar. We decided to go for it and drive north to intercept the storm. We arrived about 3 miles south of Bowdle, SD and got out of our cars. Almost immediately someone noticed the large cone tornado in the rain wrapped wall cloud. The contrast was not very good, so it was hard to get pictures, but we could see with our eyes as it turned into a wedge north of Bowdle.
A storm began to develop to our south and we had to get out of there before we lost a windshield. Even with leaving early we still got hit by some pea/penny sized hail on a storm which had just developed. We started heading east to intercept the storm again when we noticed another storm developing to the south and increasing intensity rapidly. We decided to go south on 45 to intercept that storm instead of going north on 45 to intercept the rain wrapped tornado.
This decision was well worth it as we set up on a hill and watched the storm develop into the most picturesque storm I have ever seen. First there was incredible mammatus overhead and then striations began to develop in the storm as multiple mesocyclones began to develop. We watched 2 funnel clouds begin to drop before pulling back up. As the low-level jet kicked in, the storm developed into one large mesocyclone with striations, a hail core, and mammatus that I have only seen in textbooks.
If I had the choice of seeing this storm or the tornado on Tuesday and I could only see one, this would have been my choice. I could not stop taking pictures. I also took a lot of video which I will have to go through and post once I get home.

In the end, this was the best day of the chase thus far because expectations were low, but we ended up seeing the best structured storm of the whole trip.

Today showed what can happen when a 6000 CAPE + environment, a strong cap, and strong low level vorticity all come together. We could have had nothing, or we could have had the best storms of the year. We were fortunate enough to have the latter.