Tour 6 – Day Seven
I had a great night’s sleep and we were on the road by nine, heading to southwestern Nebraska/northeastern Colorado. Apparently, June 17th is historically a good chase day with a lot of good storms having formed on this day.
On the way, Chris showed us some footage of El Reno from May 30th 2013. It was the widest tornado ever recorded and killed three professional chasers when it made an unusual shift and expanded rapidly. It essentially ran them over.
The Tempest Tours group was also taken by surprise when the tornado started moving towards them. As the video shows, some people had wandered a little far from the van. Chris was honking the horn but a couple of people looked to be taking their time, unaware that the tornado was actually coming right for them.
We stopped for lunch at Runzas in North Platte where we met up with another tour being led by Martin Lisius, Tempest Tour’s owner. The tour was for a group of Chinese celebrities.
By the time we left North Platte, a storm had initiated in northeastern Colorado and we met up with it near Julesberg. Our first stop was a brief one.
The dust and what felt like hurricane force winds hit us a few moments after I took this pic. It managed to tear my baseball cap off my head which was saying something given that I have a thick ponytail holding it on in the back. I thought it was gone for good but it got caught up in some young corn across the road and I ran for it. I had to use it to shield my face against the ferocious wind full of sand and dust on my way back to the van. I grabbed my camera off the ground and tumbled back into the van.
We headed north with the storm to our left.
We made a couple of stops, including this one that was long enough to get several time lapses as the storm moved from our left to right.
There was at least two tornadoes inside the rain wrapped core. Another chaser got photos from the other side, but our guides thought that it was too dangerous to be on that side in a rain wrapped system. Likely too easy for a tornado to pop down right on your head.
We did see a pretty good dust devil.
We headed towards Big Springs when they said the storm was heading for two more storms that had popped up near North Platte. Once they hit each other, they’d fizzle so Chris decided that we should go back south to see the storms that were coming up from the Denver area.
We got between two systems, and while there was no lightning, the structure was impressive.
The storms never got any strength with other storms coming up right behind them.
We made one stop at a dam to watch a storm move.
And then we noticed some iridescent clouds on top.
A little farther down the road, I spotted some lenticular clouds in the distance.
And at a pit stop we saw some Kelvin Helmholtz clouds.
So, it was a good day for cloud spotters.
We made one last stop to look at a decent shelf cloud.
And then made our way to Wray for the night at the Cobblestone Inn.
I got up to my room just in time to catch Westworld on HBO. I flicked through the five hundred channels on the guide.
But no HBO.
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