Short answer: Yes. A member of the public reported half-dollar hail, about 1.25 inches, near Ponderosa Park at 9:46 p.m. on Sunday, September 20, 2026, and a 10:06 p.m. warning cited trained spotters reporting quarter-size hail near Elizabeth. The "golf ball size hail" in the warnings was the warned hazard, not a reported stone.
Sunday night, September 20, 2026, a severe thunderstorm crossed the eastern edge of Douglas County and pushed out across Elbert County. The National Weather Service in Denver kept it under a chain of Severe Thunderstorm Warnings and follow-up statements from 9:52 p.m. until the last one was cancelled at 12:47 a.m., and the first warning — at 9:52 p.m. — named eastern Parker, Elizabeth, Kiowa, Ponderosa Park and The Pinery in a single impact list.
We are a Parker-based roofing team and most of that list is our own service area, so we pulled every one of those Weather Service products and read them in full. Below is every report, ranked by how much weight it actually deserves. The number you are most likely to hear at your front door this week is not the strongest one on the list — and this time the gap between them is wide enough to matter.
Was There Hail Near Parker, Elizabeth and Kiowa on September 20, 2026?
Yes, and there are two observations on record.
The Weather Service's 9:52 p.m. warning covered northwestern Elbert County and east-central Douglas County, put the storm directly over Ponderosa Park, 29 miles southeast of Denver, and gave its source as: "Public reported half dollar size hail at 9:46 pm near Ponderosa Park." Half dollar is 1.25 inches.
Fourteen minutes later, a second warning at 10:06 p.m. put the storm near Elizabeth and gave a different source: "Trained spotters reported quarter size hail near Elizabeth." Quarter is 1 inch.
Those are the two observations. Everything else from that night is either a forecast or a report from somewhere the storm had already moved on to.
How Big Was the Hail — Quarter, Half Dollar or Golf Ball?
Four sizes are already circulating for the same night. Here they are with their sourcing attached, strongest last:
- Golf ball, 1.75 inches — this appears in the HAZARD line of three separate Weather Service products, and it is not an observation. The hazard line is the size the Weather Service warned the storm could produce. No one reported a golf-ball stone to the Weather Service in any of the towns above. If a contractor quotes you golf ball hail in Parker or Elizabeth for September 20, ask them which report it came from.
- 1.5 inches — a real trained-spotter report, logged at 10:40 p.m. But read the warning that carries it: by 10:44 p.m. the storm was twelve miles southeast of Kiowa, heading for Simla and Matheson. That is a genuine number for the eastern plains. It is not an Elizabeth number and it is not a Parker number.
- Half dollar, 1.25 inches — reported by a member of the public near Ponderosa Park at 9:46 p.m. A real observation, carried in an official warning, from someone who was standing there. One notch below a trained spotter, which is a designation that means specific training, not just proximity.
- Quarter, 1 inch — reported by trained spotters near Elizabeth. This is the strongest single piece of evidence from the night for the towns we serve, for the same reason it always is: a trained spotter is a person who was looking at the ice and knows how to size it.
Stone size is only one input on your roof anyway. Wind speed, the angle the stones came in at, and how old and brittle the shingles already were all matter — which is why two houses on the same street routinely come out differently. If you want to know what you are actually looking for, we wrote up what hail damage looks like on a Colorado roof.
Which Towns Were Actually Named?
Read this as a storm track, not as a list of damaged towns:
- Ponderosa Park — the 1.25-inch public report, 9:46 p.m. The storm was directly overhead.
- Eastern Parker and The Pinery — named in the 9:52 p.m. impact list. Named in a warning, with no separate report of their own.
- Elizabeth — the 1-inch trained-spotter report, and named in the 9:52, 10:06 and 10:12 p.m. impact lists.
- Kiowa — named in the impact lists of the 9:52 and 10:06 p.m. warnings and both updates that followed. No report of its own that we can source.
- Elbert, Fondis, Simla, Matheson, Kutch, Punkin Center and Karval — the storm's path east and southeast, out past our service area. After the 10:44 p.m. warning that carried the 1.5-inch report, every later warning and update out there was radar-indicated only.
Being named in a warning is not the same as being hit. We have said that on this site before and it applies squarely here: a warning polygon covers where a storm might go, and hail from a single cell often falls in a strip a few miles wide inside it. Your neighbor two streets over can have a wrecked roof while yours is fine, and the reverse.
Is September Hail Unusual in Elbert County?
Yes — genuinely unusual, and the record we publish says by how much.
In the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Storm Events Database, covering 2000 through 2025 for the six Front Range counties we track, September accounts for 32 of 1,412 hail reports — about 2.3 percent. June alone accounts for 537. We break the record down month by month in our Colorado hail season guide, and every one of the 1,412 events is listed by date on our Front Range hail history page.
Elbert County's own share is the part worth sitting with: 330 of those 1,412 reports are Elbert County — more than any other county in the record, including Douglas. But only seven of its 330 fall in September, across twenty-six years. Open country, long sight lines, nothing to slow a storm down — and almost never this late.
Which is exactly why it is worth writing down. A September storm arrives after most homeowners have stopped thinking about hail, and after a lot of contractors have stopped driving the area. If you want the fuller picture of how hail behaves next door in Douglas County, we keep one at Douglas County hail patterns homeowners should know.
What Should I Do in the Next Few Days?
Nothing urgent, and nothing expensive. In order:
- Look from the ground first. Dents in gutters, downspouts, the metal roof vents, and any soft aluminum on the house are the easiest tells, and you can see all of them without a ladder. Check the car too — if it took dents, the roof plausibly did.
- Photograph what you find, with the date. How to document hail damage walks through what actually holds up later.
- Stay off the roof. A wet, hail-scarred slope after a late-season storm is not a place to learn anything. That is what an inspection is for.
- Do not sign anything at your door this week. A late-season storm in a rural corridor is exactly what brings out-of-area crews into a neighborhood. How to vet a roofer is the short version.
- Know the clock, but do not panic about it. No Colorado statute sets a deadline for reporting hail damage to your own insurer — your policy does, and most ask for notice promptly. Your declarations page and your carrier can tell you yours. We wrote up how long you have to file.
What Will Upstream Actually Do?
We will come out, get on the roof, photograph every slope, the ridge, the vents, the flashing and the gutters, and tell you what is up there. That is free, there is no obligation attached to it, and the answer is very often that your roof is fine — which we will say plainly, because a report that only ever finds damage is not a report.
If there is damage, we will document it the way an adjuster needs to see it and walk you through what happens next. We do not pay, waive, rebate or absorb deductibles — Colorado law prohibits it, and anyone who offers to is telling you something about themselves. Book an inspection, or call us at (720) 544-3645.
Sources: NWS Denver/Boulder Severe Thunderstorm Warnings issued 9:52, 10:06, 10:44 and 11:39 p.m. MDT on September 20 and 12:07 and 12:28 a.m. MDT on September 21, 2026, and every Severe Weather Statement that updated, cancelled or ended them through 12:47 a.m., all retrieved and read in full on September 22, 2026. No Local Storm Report had been issued for the Ponderosa Park or Elizabeth observations when we checked, so the source lines in the warnings are the primary record. Hail counts: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Storm Events Database, event type hail, 2000 through 2025, six counties.