May 29th, 2004 : Bodacious Redemption in Harper County

Chase Partner: Pete Johnson, Kiel Ortega
Base: (none)
SPC Outlook: High

    Best chase of my life thus far. Definitely paid Kansas's debt to me for the May 18th and 22nd cap busts. It just felt wrong seeing tornadoes, I was so used to busting and not seeing any tornadoes. Especially the madness that occurred in Harper County. May 12th was continued on May 29th, but this time, we were ready for them! However, despite it being my best chase ever, my camera lied to me and did not charge the battery the night before.

    We started off targeting Ponca City, but on the road the obs were still indicating the dryline had not been moving. With this knowledge, our target then moved further west and a bit further north to Anthony, KS. We randomly decided to get off on U.S. Highway 77 to meet State Road 44 in Kansas. On the way there, Kiel read a sign in South Haven, KS and went nuts and told Pete to turn around. Pete and I look and read "Bodacious Meats : Nobody Beats Our Meat." Last thing one would expect in rural Kansas.

    Anyways, we contined and found that State Road 44 was closed all the way to Anthony. Little did we know this information would be very useful later in the chase. We went up to U.S. Highway 160 and traveled west into Harper. We stopped and decided to hang out and wait for initiation in Harper (it was around 2:30 PM). Met some former OU students, talked to a Kansas Highway Patrol Officer, threw rocks at the cap, and went back for more drinks in Harper (we had been waiting on a dirt road off highway 160 where it turns south outside Harper). Information was slim to none. Roger called and said we were in a good area of moisture convergence, we heard a few surface obs from a fading weather radio, and we heard something about initiation expected around 4 - 5PM. It happened a bit later than that, though. We still waited around Harper until we saw things initiating a little further north. It was a somewhat good call at the time, but we recovered from it later.

    We went north on 14 to turn west on Ridge road after some frantic looks at some anvils. We continued to see what looked to us like an LP. We kept going west, trying to stay with the road, but it curved north to State Road 42, which we took west and turned south again on Isabel Rd. We pulled off the road and watched the storm split. The left split was kind of confusing. It was definitely rotating anticyclonically at upper levels, but it seemd to have weak cyclonic rotation under the base. Not sure still on this one. Anyways, we followed the left split up to a storm to the north and watched it run into this other supercell. Pete and Kiel saw this one woman and mentioned she was hot, with the husband driving the truck behind her lol. Anyways, we watched this storm on U.S. Highway 54 and saw it was really crappy. After listening to the muffled weather radio barely picking up the WIchita office (I used my hand covering the speaker to drown out most of the static), we heard about another storm that was warned SW of Medicine lodge moving E at 25 with hail possibly as big as baseballs. SOuthern storm, moving east, baseballs. Time to catch it. We drove to Kingman and raced south on State Road 14 back to Harper and continuing a bit further south on State Road 2.

    We watied and watched the bell approach on the side of State Road 2, and saw a brief roping spin-up. The NWS seems to have counted this to touchdown, so apparently that was tornado 1, but that same wall cloud kept having this persistent funnel, until it finally touched down. Tornado 2 oficially. THis was the coolest on I have seen. It lasted about 20 minutes and was a long, thin cone. Very photogenic. However, around the 15 minute mark the inflow winds had died and things were calm and extremely quiet. Kiel looks up and goes "ohhhh shit". I do the same, with the same response. Rotation over our heads. We were not the only ones there, as a few other people saw our panic and decided to also leave. We go a bit further north and it seems to die down a bit. However, after shortly being out of the car again and filming the first tornado more, we see the eye. Things nightmares are made of. The ever-watching, rotating eye. We are definitely intimidated and go up to 160 to go west, but then on the opposite side of the wall loud from the eye, a new tornado forms, so we turn around and go back to about where we were. Tornado numero 3. It was a nice stove pipe and eventually went into the form of a wedge.

    We lost count of the tornadoes after that. Our rough estimate was between 7 and 12. NWS says upwards of nine are possible. I will trust the NWS numbers, because I do not want to try and count. We went east on 30th street (a dirt road), because we knew 44 to the south was closed. The wedge became rain wrapped (or lifted, we are not sure) and then reappeared. There seemed to be satellite tornadoes to our east, and there was rotation to our north, and later a rope tornado came down not from under the wall cloud, but very close to it. The storm was heading towards Argonia. On 30th, we saw some damage from earlier, and a lost cow in a wheat field we believe may have been picked up. Poor guy. We got to Argonia Rd. and looked north and saw the wedge. We wondered if we should go to Argonia if it had been hit. We were informed, however, that Argonia had been missed by a mile, so we continued east and went north on State Road 49. It was getting dark, and we were still seeing things going nuts. At one point we saw a stovepipe rotate around a wedge and the wedge shot off to the east.

    Wichita dodged a bullet that day. Many places were lucky. The tornadoes did not hit any majorly populated areas. Otherwise, a couple of those could have been rated F4's. See the ICT NWS page for details of the event.