After a holiday week that threw three-inch hail at Connecticut and shoved wind down the whole eastern seaboard, the map finally caught its breath. The 7th pulled almost all of its 49 reports up into the Northern Plains — South Dakota and Wyoming doing most of the talking, out where a storm can rumble across open range without crossing many roofs.
This was a wind day, and a modest one — 33 of the 49 reports were gusts. South Dakota led everybody with 23, most of them wind around Webster, and the hardest single blow was a 76 mph gust just across the line at Bowman, North Dakota. None of it came off a towering supercell; it was the ragged, fast-moving kind of line that flattens some corn, snaps a few limbs, and is gone by dark.
Wyoming carried the day's odd notes — a pair of quick tornadoes near Upton and the state's biggest hail, an inch and a half, in the same northeast corner. The single largest stone anywhere, though, fell way out west: a 1.5-incher at Klein, Montana. That's about where hail stops being a nuisance and starts leaving a mark — an inch and a half bruises the shingle mat and shakes granules loose in streaks, even when the yard looks clean an hour later.
If one of those Wyoming spin-ups or that Montana cell crossed your place, the thing to remember is that damage this size doesn't announce itself. A tornado that clips a treeline and a 1.5-inch stone both leave harm you only find by getting up top and looking — not by standing in the driveway squinting at the roofline. Get someone who climbs for a living to walk it while the storm that caused it is still the obvious answer.
For the crews, there's not much of a canvass here — the only clean hail is that single Montana stone and Wyoming's northeast pocket, and the wind is scattered from South Dakota into North Dakota with nothing to concentrate on. The season's real hail tally lives on the Top States for Hail board. Your own county is in the table under this — check it and see if the 7th put anything over your head worth a second look.