11 June 2019
“No laughing in the van.”
La Junta, CO to Woodward, OK (665 km)
I was up at six and went for a short walk before the meeting at 9:30. Bill gave us a quick briefing, noting potential in central Kansas for thunderstorms but likely not a tornado because the dew points were a bit low.
We headed east into Kansas watching the models show a storm and then not show one.
We stopped for lunch at Porky’s Parlor in Syracuse where I had a pretty good chicken wrap.
It had an interesting menu.
We had to ask what the Texan Toothpicks were – onions and jalapeño deep fried together.
From here we continued east through Dodge City and stopped to watch the tops go up.
Then I realized my nice expensive wide angle lens had two deep scratches on it.
Bummer. And I had absolutely no clue when it happened. Since it was a bubble lens, I didn’t have a filter on it like my other lenses.
At first I couldn’t see it on the photos on the camera screen, but once I downloaded them to the computer, the artifacts were clearly visible as can be seen in this time-lapse from our first stop near Kinsley, Kansas.
That system had some decent lightning but the base was too high to produce a tornado.
We turned south towards Greensburg and made a stop to watch a wall cloud.
We followed the storm to the south and at one point, it was kicking up a lot of dust near an updraft base.
It didn’t produce any tornadoes or funnel clouds but appeared to have some rotation.
And NOAA’s hurricane Hunter made another appearance.
We followed the storm to the south, watching it billow into the sky as the sun set.
It was an amazing sunset, complete with the scratches on the lens visible.
As the sun set, it was followed up with some rapid fire lightning.
We stayed at least an hour and the storm slowly moved away from us to the south. We packed it in by ten and headed to Woodward, OK to stay at the Northwest Inn.
This was the same one I’d stayed at on other tours and knew the rooms were hard to find. This time, I got a map.
Go to Day Three
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See also: Bill Reid’s entry on 11 June