16 June 2018 - How Long do You Think it'll Take to Fix?

Tour 6 – Day Six

I was up at six and went for a walk. I definitely had had one too many snacks over the last few days and I could feel it. I had dropped a quarter into one of the weight machines at a gas station and stood there hoping that my clothes and lunch weighed fifteen pounds. Six weeks on the road did put on eight pounds.

We said farewell to the mini-tour A group who were heading back to Denver at 9:30.

We headed east to South Dakota, stopping by to say hello to the Jackalope on the way out of town.

Monsoon season was early this year with Hurricane Bud coming up off the Pacific and drowning the southwest. Apparently, that wasn’t good for severe weather on the plains.

It was a drought year for tornadoes. We could have probably counted on our hands how many tornadoes had even formed and only Tour 4 had intercepted anything. I wasn’t holding out much hope for my final week of chasing.

But our luck would change. As they say, bad things come in threes. We hit the deer and we lost our air conditioning. We just needed one more.

So, just before we got to Lusk, Wyoming, we noticed that Chris was browsing for tires on the internet.

At the same time, I was thinking that I had to get to a gas station very soon given the three teas I had had for breakfast and another tourmate was wondering how to get pictures of the nice purple flowers on the side of the road.

Then we heard a funny sound.

So, I found a bush, the tourmate got her pictures of the purple flowers and we asked Chris to stop looking at tires on the internet.

After today, our Lusk would begin to change.

Chris managed to get the tire changed in under thirty minutes.

Some of us had flashbacks to A Christmas Story.

We had to watch a Youtube video to figure out how to get the spare down from under the van.

Luckily, the spare was in good shape and all the tools needed to change the tire were there. (When I worked as a mechanic in the Armed Forces, I can’t tell you how many times we’d find a truck with no jack, no lug wrench or a flat or missing spare. Kudos to Tempest Tours for ensuring the equipment was there and in good working order!).

We pulled into Lusk and found the first truck stop in town to check the tire pressure. All looked good and we continued on, having lunch in Chadron.

The storms started to form on a line from the southeast to the northwest due to a boundary formed by the previous days storms. Chris described the boundary layer like a wake from a boat in the atmosphere. That enabled the warm air to lift once it met the boundary.

We turned south for a while to watch the storms form and said hello to a herd of cattle that didn’t seem to like our presence.

That calf out front was a little bit of a rebel. Every time its mother herded it a little farther away, it would find a spot to stop and stare at us.

We had to mooooove on and headed north, passing through Valentine and picking a storm to the north of the line. We had some decent lightning while we were approaching it and used our cell phones to capture some images while we drove.

This would be the best lightning of the day.

As we drove east, the base of the storm became clear.

It was the lowest base I’d seen to date.

We made a short stop in a farmer’s driveway to watch it swirl.

Then the farmer came out and asked what we found so interesting about it. He’d barely got the words out when huge rain drops fell on us like someone with a bucket of water had just flicked it as us. The farmer waved and beat it back to his house.

We drove east to get to the far side of the storm but the Missouri River got in the way.

We had to drive a half hour to the east to get across while the storm kept going north east. By the time we got close to it again, it had fizzled.

There was a larger storm that had formed outside the watch box that was too far north and most chasers had not gone that way. Those that did intercept that northern storm didn’t get a tornado but word had it that it was a pretty nice storm.