On Monday evening, I was on a call I couldn’t step away from. By the time I wrapped up and made it to the airstrip, the storm had already begun to dissipate. To add a final insult, my 24-70mm f2.8 lens has developed a fault where it is stuck on a very narrow aperture and therefore completely underexposes everything. I was shooting at ISO 64,000 and still couldn’t pull anything usable out of the scene. So between the timing and the gear, I walked away with nothing like what I could have captured. But my trustworthy colleagues made sure to do my work for me and captured it from multiple angles, so be sure to watch the video at the end.

The classic anvil formation lit up by the late afternoon sun. That flat top isn’t just a visual feature — it is the cloud physically hitting the tropopause, the ceiling of the lower atmosphere, and spreading outward. The orange glow is the setting sun catching the upper ice crystals.

But let me tell you what everyone else was watching while I was indoors.

To the south, somewhere over Malelane and Komatipoort, roughly more than 50km away, one of the most extraordinary storm systems I have ever seen was building. I say “I have ever seen” loosely, because I didn’t actually see it. But from every account, and from the images the rangers captured, this was genuinely one for the books.

What they were looking at was a fully developed cumulonimbus, the largest and most powerful cloud formation in our atmosphere. To understand why this one was so special, it helps to understand how it got there and to be that big.

It starts with heat and moisture. On a warm summer afternoon, the surface of the earth heats up, and the air directly above it warms with it. Warm air is less dense than the cool air above, so it rises, and as it rises, it cools. At a certain point, when the cooling air hits its dew point, the temperature at which water vapour condenses into water droplets, a cloud begins to form. If the atmosphere is unstable enough, meaning there is enough warmth and moisture to keep that air parcel rising even as it cools, the cloud keeps building upward. And upward. And upward.

Hard to blame anyone for stopping to take this all in.

This is what we saw on Monday. A day of intense heat combined with exceptionally high atmospheric moisture content gave that rising air column exactly what it needed. The cloud didn’t just build, it towered. A mature cumulonimbus can reach heights of 12 to 15km above the Earth’s surface. At that altitude, the rising air slams into the tropopause, the boundary layer between the troposphere and the stratosphere above it. The reason the air stops rising at the tropopause is a temperature inversion. Throughout the troposphere, the rule is straightforward: the higher you go, the colder it gets, and that temperature gradient is what keeps driving the warm air parcel upward. But at the tropopause, that reverses. The stratosphere is actually warmer than the air just below it, largely because of ozone absorbing solar radiation. So the rising air parcel, which has been cooling as it climbs, suddenly finds itself warmer than the surrounding air and loses its buoyancy. It can no longer rise. It spreads sideways instead, creating that unmistakable flat-topped anvil shape.

As the light faded, the lightning became more visible.

Inside that anvil, the electrical activity was relentless. The violent updrafts and downdrafts within a mature cumulonimbus create intense collisions between ice crystals and water droplets, and those collisions generate enormous electrical charge differences between the top and bottom of the cloud. The result is the continuous lightning that everyone watching on Monday described. Not a flash here and there. Non-stop lightning.
Because the storm was so distant and the rest of the sky completely clear, people could see it from all over the region.

By this point the storm was beginning to collapse. The lightning continued even as the structure broke down — the electrical charge built up over hours doesn’t just switch off immediately.

That is the other thing about a cumulonimbus of this scale: it is visible from enormous distances precisely because it has punched so high into the atmosphere. If you ever see a cloud like this on the horizon, the flat anvil shape is your clearest signal of what you are dealing with. It means the storm has reached full maturity, and the community directly beneath it is getting an absolute hammering. At 50km away, we were in no danger, but we had front row seats to something that the atmosphere doesn’t produce every day.

Now here is the bigger context for what Monday’s storm represents.

Coming into this summer, the long-range forecast predicted a below-average rainfall season for us. As of this morning, our seasonal rainfall total sits at just over 1000mm — and it is still raining. To put that in context, in recorded history at Londolozi, we have only ever broken the 1000mm mark once before. That was back in the year 2000. We have just equalled that in a season that was forecast to be a quiet one. We still have a long way to go before we threaten the all-time records, but the fact that we are here at all is remarkable. The land is soaked, the rivers are running, and the bush looks incredible for it. Monday’s storm was a long way from here, but it was part of the same story — a summer that has had no interest in being average. It feels fitting that in Londolozi’s 100th year, the land has been given this. Water is everything out here — it drives the grass, the browsers, the predators, the whole chain of life that we are privileged to watch every single day. A season like this one doesn’t just fill the rain gauges. It sets the table for years to come.

Monday’s storm was a long way from here, but later that night, we got another 35mm, which added to our total and contributed to a summer that has had no interest in being average.