Thursday I woke up with no intention to chase at all. There was a slight risk in a large portion of western and central Kansas that was easily in range for me. But the more I looked at it, the less I liked it. It looked like a multi-cell cluster of crap that would eventually line out. Tornado chances were almost 0%. Plus, I knew that if I did poke out there, I’d have to return to Denver that night to pick up Mike Carlson for the next day’s chase to South Dakota. No thanks.
But then I started listening to what Tony Laubach and Patrick Martin were saying about the day in our Facebook forecast group. It was things along the line of “Well, the Campo day didn’t look good so I sat it out. Whoops!” “Dude, 60′s dews in the High Plains in June is something you just go after.” Argh, they were right dammit! So now I considered heading out and would return to Denver after to pick up Mike. But then, Mike texted me and said he was already off work and could chase right now. Perfect!
I picked Mike up in Lafayette (you guys that I keep having to pick up need to move closer!) and off we went targeting the Goodland to Colby area in western KS. As we pulled in to Colby to gas up, towers were popping up like crazy. The atmosphere had tons of CAPE and good moisture to boot. The forcing and shear were really lacking which is why I wasn’t too positive about the setup to begin with, but I was ready to get after it. The first cell that caught our interest was north of I-70 near Oberlin. We jaunted up there but the storm was putting out a massive wall of dust, so getting photo’s wasn’t the greatest. As you can see here, the dust cloud was coming after us…
This wasn’t something we were too interested in so we abandoned this cell and went after a new one that was developing to the south back near Saint Peter. It wasn’t too impressive looking either but cells kept firing all around us, so I knew we’d be getting something good soon. Here’s the storm near Saint Peter…
We eventually left this storm and dropped south back toward the town of Collyer were a new, more stout cell was going up. We drove through the little town and finally found some good structure to shoot. We were right next to a graveyard as well!
Mike summons the walking dead with his camera…
After we both agreed that, “it would be so sweet if like, lightning struck one of the tombstones and then like, all of a sudden a hand just started digging up through the ground” we darted south to stay out ahead of the cell which was still exhibiting beautiful structure. We were on a dirt road when we both noticed what looked like a lowering forming.
Here’s one more zoomed in on the feature…
We continued to stair-step the dirt road network south of Collyer but had to stop when a band of outflow clouds passed over us. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. This wave of clouds was so turbulent and had all kinds of insane motions in them. They weren’t organized at all but it was pretty surreal sitting under them for a few minutes…
Finally as the precip caught up with us, we didn’t want to get stuck on the muddy roads so we shot back north to Quinter via the Castle Rock road. We saw a few of the cells coming toward us had some 2″ hail markers on it, so I ducked away under an overhang of an old gas station that had been converted in to a pizza place. As the storms neared us, they weakened and never had any hail at all. At first a few bolts of lightning were near by and with us under cover, we were able to jump out and grab a few.
Then it got a little better…
And then it got WAY better!
That’s actually probably the best lightning photo I’ve ever gotten. I just happened to have my shutter open as it hit. Lucky timing for sure.
Eventually the light show faded and we started figuring out where we wanted to stay for the night and what the chase target was going to be for tomorrow. We caravanned to North Platte, NE with Tony Laubach and Ben Holcomb and called it a day. I was not expecting much at all, but was psyched that I got as many good photo’s as I did.
The chase statistic’s for this chase will be included in the write up of June 15th since this was a 2 day chase!
Awesome lightning pics, Scott! Great job!
Thanks!