Travelling artist Mike Steadman put down his camera and ran for shelter as a small tornado formed before his eyes.
At approximately 6 p.m. on July 11, fierce winds and debris came flying through the air from a tornado, which touched down briefly 100 yards away from Steadman near Martin Wenaas' ranch approximately three miles east of Cypress Lake.
"I saw a tiny little weird cloud off in the distance. I could see it forming. Then it was coming straight north towards me," said Steadman, who was in the process of capturing images of the tornado's touch down with his digital camera.
"It had dropped a few times and had popped back up," he said.  "It was this tight mile-long thing that spun off in the air and then ended. It was just spilling into wall cloud."
Steadman saw the twister touch down once before it disappeared behind a hillside.
"I was standing in the yard and just filming it, I was watching it go along and then all of a sudden I got hit by rocks and branches and stuff so I ran. I thought maybe there's another one just coming in behind me. I think it was just the debris from that one swirling around."
According to the artist who was staying in the area and photographing the land while travelling through the province on foot, the storm lasted for approximately 45 minutes from when he first noticed the clouds coming in to when it passed by.
"It had been raining, hail came down, not a lot of hail, but some and a lot of rain and wind. I got chased into the house while I was filming it," Steadman said.
Wenaas, the ranch owner, watched the tornado cross the junction of highways 21 and 13 five miles south of his property.
At the time Wenaas was outside watching his young cousins as they took horse rides in the corral.
"I was watching the cloud to the west, but then  I saw this one coming from the southwest and it was really coming," he said. "Finally I just said, ‘OK that’s it, the lightning is just getting a little too close.’ I was watching at the same time that one southwest cloud came through and that’s the one Mike got pictures of and that was just boiling, it was coming fast and hard."
Because of the approaching storms from the south and west Wenaas was almost trapped.
"I’m glad that it didn’t hit us," he said. "It was all one bank."
According to the rancher, everything went grey as the area was pelted with wind, rain and marble-sized hail.
"We were in the barn and just got the horses unsaddled when it hit and then I had run and close the quonset door. We had to run from the barn to the house," he said. No damages were reported at the property.
According to Gregg Walters, warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada, the weather service has issued several severe thunderstorm watches and warnings for southwest Saskatchewan and the Maple Creek area within the last week.
"We didn't have any tornado warnings or watches out (that day)," he said. According to Walters, the convective weather last week may be linked to the severe storms.
"Basically we've had fairly moist, warm and unstable air mass over the southern part of Saskatchewan for a few days now," he said. "What we are going to be seeing now is sort of an improving trend."
The meteorologist says it's fairly normal at this time of year to experience this type of stormy weather.
"It's one of the things that does provide some moisture for the crops," he said. "Certainly July is right around the peak month of getting thunderstorms. It drops off in August and then by September that's pretty well the end of it, although you can still get some thunderstorms into early September as well.