May 24-26, 2026: Sun halos and hot Route 66 lightning, from Kansas to New Mexico

 
Minor weather, or no weather, forces storm chasers to be creative when we don’t have a quick commute home. But sometimes those quiet days yield magical moments.

On May 24, Alethea and I followed a sun halo to Liberal, Kansas. Sun halos seem to follow us around – or perhaps we’re just extra sensitive to them. I’m always looking for these rings of light caused by refraction in ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Halos can form around the sun or the moon and may be accompanied by other kinds of “rainbow” arcs. We saw one over Mount Rushmore in 2022, and I’ve seen them on the east and west coasts of Florida.

The Land of Oz in Liberal offered fun foregrounds for this sun halo. I shot a time-lapse as the fluff from the cottonwood trees floated through the air against the blue sky, catching the light like fairy dust. And then we moved on to Garden City, Kansas, and photographed clouds over a peaceful wheat field before capturing a stunning sunset near Satanta as the birds sang.

I made a video of all of this set to some very chill music. It’s the kind of thing I’ll watch when I can’t take the stress of everyday life, which, these days, is most of the time. A video doesn’t hold the same transporting power of actually storm chasing and being immersed in nature, but it helps.

The next day, May 25, seemed marginal for storms, but I hoped we might see some as we wandered into New Mexico, going the long way to reposition for a planned chase in southwest Texas the next day.

We’ve enjoyed visiting Tee Pee (Or TePee) Curios in Tucumcari in the past. It’s a great Route 66 landmark with lots of cool, kitschy souvenirs. So we headed that way as the clouds built.

The shop folk were kind enough to turn on the neon for a few minutes so I could get pictures as the sky darkened with clouds. As we emerged from the shop, the storms were roiling and spitting out lightning, and we got doused with rain. Still, there wasn’t a ton of structure, so we headed east, since we had reservations in Odessa that night.

The lightning was so intense, we couldn’t resist stopping to check it out, coming back west a bit on Route 66 at San Jon. The Mother Road parallels I-40 there. We had almost no traffic to contend with, and the lightning was fantastic! We spent some time photographing the sparky show and caught a ton of bolts.

I wasn’t using a lightning trigger, just shooting almost continuously with my Nikon – and I filmed the storms with my phone, too. We even caught a couple of CGs with the Route 66 sign, to my delight. I stacked six exposures to show several of the bolts I shot from the middle of the road in a short period of time.

 

The next morning, we reckoned with the forecast, which looked bleak – with storms much more distant than expected – and decided to forget the Texas plan and head north into New Mexico so we could travel to Great Sand Dunes National Park the following day.

We couldn’t resist a stop in Roswell, where another excellent sun halo was accompanied by a circumhorizontal arc. Great alien vibes!

We drove through a heavy storm near Ramon after stopping for a few photos, then followed the fading halo north, pausing a couple of times south of Santa Fe to take more pictures. I do love the Land of Enchantment. And it was fun to visit Santa Fe, however briefly.

I also think any day I can get a good photo is a good one, and we had three days of satisfying photography.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 
This was our chase update from the road on May 24 as we shot that beautiful sunset.