Tour 5 – Day Four
I slept a solid eight hours and we got together at 9:30 for orientation. There was an enhanced risk area that covered the southern half of South Dakota and northern half of Nebraska. Bill decided that we should head east and have lunch while they watched the conditions develop.
But not before Bill dropped into Taco Johns to let the manager know what he thought about the employee locking the doors on us the night before.
We drove to Rapid City and had lunch at Wendy’s and then continued east towards Wall. I had visited Wall in 1990 and Wall Drug was still a thing with billboards all along the road.
When you see these for more than an hour before you get to Wall, you know you just have to drop in.
We didn’t. We continued east with the Badlands to our south. There was a storm approaching Rapid City that looked promising but it was still early and they expected it to dissipate. It produced a lot of hail but no tornado.
We were watching a cell develop near Interior, South Dakota, and we made a pit stop that Bill said might be the last for a while.
I picked up some Sarsaparilla and went outside to see long bolts of lightning on the leading edge of the storm. We turned south with lightning surrounding us.
We made one stop but the lightning was so intense, we got chased back into the vans. I left my GoPro going.
We left the area and made another stop where we watched this system dance around.
The lightning chased us away from here as well and we made another stop but Bill had us load right back up because the rear flank downdraft was crossing the valley ahead of us and he wanted us out of the “bird’s cage.”
Or was it the “bear’s cage?”
They called the small beads of rain “atomized” rain and said it was indicative of strong rotation. At one point, the radar registered a rotation of 148 knots and they were surprised that we weren’t seeing a tornado. Granted, one could have been rain wrapped and we just didn’t see it.
We drove ahead of the rain and at one point did see some rotation (above) that Bill later said was similar to the development in the El Reno tornado, the widest tornado ever recorded.
But this storm got undercut by cold outflow winds.
We continued south ahead of the storm, stopping from time to time to watch for rotation but nothing took hold. I loved the angry clouds in this time lapse.
There was some good lightning but fairly sporadic.
We were trying to outrun the storm and made a stop in Mission, South Dakota, where the storm loomed on the edge of town. We had to make this a fast stop.
As it got later, the lightning was more sheet than bolts but the clouds were spectacular.
We made a stop in Valentine for something to eat but the storm was moving faster than expected and only a few of us got something before we piled back in the van to make the dash to Thedford and our hotel.
The storm followed us the whole way and we got in around 10:30. The storm was overhead within an hour.
In all, we chased and were chased by the one storm for more than six hours.
Our hotel was the Roadside Inn which was quite nice for a small town hotel.
It did have a railway line next to it and a crossing right next to the hotel so that the trains blew their horns as they approached.
We suggested they change their name to the Railside Inn.
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