Published on June 3, 2019

One of my favorite things about prairies is being out under that big open sky. With no trees to block the view it’s a sea of wildflowers and grasses stretching off to the horizon. Whether it’s a clear blue sky with puffy white clouds, a colorful sunset, or something more sinister and stormy, the sky makes a big part of a prairie. To that end, we started a Prairie Skies series here on the blog.

On May 18th, 2019 I was lucky enough to attend a Wildflower Tour at The Nature Conservancy’s Clymer Meadow Preserve in North Texas. NPAT is privileged to hold two conservation easements within the 1100-acre Clymer Meadows Preserve: the Webster Tract and the Wylie Tract. The tour was lead by Brandon Belcher, TNC’s North Texas Preserves Manager. It threatened rain all morning but luckily the weather held until we were almost done. I’ll have a full trip report on the tour, but in this post I wanted to focus on the sky.

We just had to check out a ridge to see what some white flowers were. Turned out to be larkspur, (Delphinium carolinianum).

Once that mystery was solved Brandon had the right idea and started taking photos of this dramatic sky.

A cool breeze started kicking up — felt so good.

It started getting windier and winder, and we felt a few drops of rain…

The sky got darker and we heard thunder off in the distance and decided we better make a run for it…

Made it back, just in time.

So what do you think, is that the start of a tornado? I didn’t stick around to find out. Leave me a comment below and let me know. — Lisa Spangler