July went out the way a lot of it came in — on the High Plains, with wind out front and hail in one tight pocket. The 31st put up 40 reports, and the Texas Panhandle carried nearly half of them: 17, almost all gusts, topped by a 77 mph blow at Hart with more of the same around Hereford.
The hail story was smaller and sharper. Every one of South Dakota's seven reports was hail, and they clustered up in the Black Hills around Pringle — where the day's biggest stone, a 1.75-incher, came down. That's a tidy little hail cell doing real work in a small area: inch-and-three-quarter ice cracks shingle mats and dents anything metal it catches flush, and a cluster that tight means the roofs under it all took roughly the same beating.
The rest was High Plains wind, scattered thin — six reports across New Mexico around Hobbs, five in Kansas, a couple up in Wyoming — the kind of end-of-July setup where the heat builds all afternoon and the storms fire along the dryline after dark. No tornadoes anywhere, which on a Panhandle wind day is a small mercy.
Two different jobs on this map. If you were in the Texas Panhandle, the wind is what to check — ridge, rakes, flashing, the edges a 77 mph gust pries first. If you were up around Pringle in the Black Hills, it's the broad flat of the roof that took the ice. Either kind of damage stays dry and hidden through the tail of summer; the leak doesn't show up until the first cold rain, and by then the storm that caused it is a month gone. Get eyes on the slope now, while the 31st is still the easy answer.
For the crews, the two canvasses don't overlap: a wind sweep across the Texas Panhandle from Hereford to Hart, and a tight, fresh hail pocket around Pringle, South Dakota that's worth the drive for how concentrated it is. The season's giant-ice leaderboard stays on the Top States for Hail board. The full county-by-county list is below — find your town and see which side of the last day of July you landed on.