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5-05-07
Wow, what a first day to our vacation. Things originally went smoothly. I met Joel in Erie around 2:45, didn't take long to pack up and we set off. Our original rental vehicle was a Chevy Cobalt, but the guy there made some sort of mistake and we ended up with a PT Cruiser. It gets some pretty good gas mileage. Anyway, skipping way ahead, we finally pulled wi-fi somewhere in Kansas and saw that our target area was now put in a high risk. Wow, things are looking good.
Our original target was Hays, Kansas, pretty much smack dab right in the middle of the high risk. So, we stopped in a town called Salina, about 100 miles east of Hays, to gas up. Now, before I tell this story, I should mention that when I met Joel at his house he just got off work. He tried sleeping in the car on the way down but it wasn't happening. So, he was running on ONE hour of sleep. Everyone knows how your mind works on extreme lack of shuteye. Well, I noticed as I was pulling in that the cheapest gas was $2.97. After fueling up, hanging the nozzle up, he said "the gas was only $2.77!". I looked at the pump and said "yeah, diesel is". Well, that's what went into the vehicle. Now on to my stupid boneheaded move. I started it up and drove. Yep, two not-so-wise moves made back to back. Anyway, it ran fine for a little bit, then we heard the injectors start popping. We pulled off on the next exit about 2 miles down the road. Luckily there was a Holiday Inn there and we booked a room. We pretty much figured our vacation was over already. The tow truck came and we told the guy our situation. He got on his phone and called up someone he knew and told us they could do it the same day. Otherwise we would have had to wait til Monday to get a replacement car. Anyway, the guys at the body shop fixed it very fast and the total was only $150 which we had to shell out of our own pockets. So, on with our vacation.
We wasted no time in taking a quick look at the radar and booked west after seeing some storms starting to fire on radar. The drive there seemed to take about 20 minutes. We saw a very nice tower going up to the west. After listening to the scanner, we quickly learned the storm was dropping tornadoes left and right. So we hightailed it to catch up. Once we got a little closer, we saw a very impressive beaver tail wrapping into the storm. Neither of us has ever seen something like this before, it was pretty awesome.
The contrast isn't too great, but you can make it out there low on the horizon. We keep on west and pull over again, wondering which way to head. Here are some more shots of the tail wrapping up into it.
We decided to head further west to get under the base a little more. By this time the tornado had apparently dissipated as we heard over the radio. As the base became clearly visible, a huge wall cloud was visible immediately. There were many chasers already parked along the side of the road. We drove up a little further and got closer. The wall cloud was definitely rotating and pretty well at that. It looked like it wanted to drop a tornado, but never did.
These next pictures a slightly contasted to show more detail. The lighting wasn't really great at all.
After realizing that it wasn't going to produce, we book west again to get on another storm that had also been tornado warned. It really didn't seem like a long drive there either, but on the way back we realized that we drove about 2 hours to get out to these. Now the storm we were getting on now was an absolute monster of a cell. There were some brilliant anvil crawlers on the way there with some pretty well defined mammatus. This was a chasers perfect storm in terms of visibilty. Right away, I could have SWORE that I saw a tornado backlit by the lightning. Joel and I even thought we saw a power flash. The chasers just up the road from us must have thought the same thing because they all had their gear pointing toward that area. As it pushed out a little more toward us, there was nothing there. I don't know if I was seeing things or not, but I would have put my money on that there was a tube there. Anyway, there were some more very interesting wall clouds that formed under this base.
This one formed and showed some obvious rotation.
Now it tightens up and shows some more rotation. It was a very nice rounded base.
It quickly lost its structure and fell apart, just like the rest of them. There were more updrafts going up to the southwest, but it was now getting pretty dark and we both weren't really up to a nocturnal chase, especially after both of us being pretty exhausted.
So, what a first day! We have already put around 750 miles on the car and many more to come. STILL no tornadoes, but we are getting extremely close. We have been the best positions possible on all of our chases this year, but they just didn't want to produce for us. If we keep this up, we'll eventually start nailing them.
Later on that night, Joel noticed a small hook echo passing directly over top of us. We both went to the window of the hotel room and it got very windy and eerie. Sure enough, it was tornado warned shortly later as a trained spotter called in a tube on the ground. We got a pretty intense light show here and some heavy rains. We were actually under a pretty interesting watch. This box was called a "PDS", Potentially Dangerous Situation. You can see Salina right in the middle of all this mess. That line to the left eventually caught up to us and some brand new storms fired just to our south and rolled over top of us.
