June 12th, 2004 : Don't Forget to Take a Towel!

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

    This day was almost a May 12th all over again. However, we made a save at the waning hour of the chase. This chase made me realize how much I am starting to despise the whole popular chase spot concept. The "Throckmorton magic" and this year's "You can't lose in Harper County". That just makes me want to fuel the fire more so that next year they will park in Harper county as an F5 rolls through Custer County, OK (random spot). It degrades on the area as well. Moore's had the brunt of it for some time now. What would residents hink of you idolizing their neighborhood to always get hit by tornadoes? I sure wouldnt like it. But that's my two cents. 25 more chases and I can get a bouncy ball.

    Our target was near Wichita, and that was about it. However, the night before Pete and Kiel vote to leave to Derby to spend the night at Kiel's mom's house. There are obvious perks to leaving that night: look at data longer and later, sleep in, and no driving in the morning! I didn't think leaving was quite necessary, but I eventually agreed and we arrived in Derby late late late that night. Pete and I slept on the floor, with Kiel sleeping on the couch. After the lights go out Kiel says "Awwwwww....this blanket smells like cat piss!" It was rather hilarious to Pete and I, as Kiel go another blanket and laid down, only to exclaim a minute or two later, "Ahhhhr, this one smells like cat piss, too!" Pete and I couldn't believe and lay there laughing, joking about how the cats will pee on him that night. Our predictions were close for Saturday night ;).

    We woke up and looked at the situation a couple of times around 10 AM. Kiel and Pete wanted to hit the road, and we all did expect a bit of an early show that day. The dryline seemed to be bulging a bit in north central Kansas, so we left to investigate. BAD MOVE! We were at our original target, why move!? Oh well, we drove all the way to almost within Salina and got Wifi at the Fairfield Inn. The dryline had become diffuse there. Kiel was also accusing me of looking at a fat biker that drove by, when obviously he missed the girl in the Jeep in a bikini to notice a biker go by ;). We decided to go back south, and we went as far as somewhere near Hutchinson and Hesston. Watched an LP-like storm that was a bit elevated play around a bit as towers were teasing us to our north. We played the back and forth game too much. No storm was worth a commitment to chase it. We played ourselves out of the game until Chad called and said there was a tornado warning in Harper County. We decide we are too far away to try for it, so we floow this one storm that had fired off the dryline that was pathetic and evaporated. We proceeded to head back to Derby when all hell apparently broke loose. The cell from Harper survived and the sirens were sounding around the Wichita, Derby, Mulvane area. Kiel was a bit worried about family and where the storm was and what to tell them. The car was tense until he heard exactly where it was and that he was pretty confident it would miss his house. We were about far enough east at this time to try to cut in front of it (but we did have to cut east a couple more times to avoid being hail-cored). Most amazing mammatus I have ever seen. They were beautiful, undulating, and crisp. Almost worth seeing instead of the tornado (seeing as how the radio guy was talking about massive loads of people on the road watching the tornado).

    We watched the storm for a while, and ended up going a little further south through Atlanta. It was getting dark and the lightning was impressive. Just the structure and rotation in the storm as a whole was beautiful. As the base got over the road, we decide to go a bit further south, seeing as how we were seeing localized roataion under the base o our north and up.And through the lightning there was a funnel! It was very, very persistent, but it did have condensation on the ground and had a debris cloud we saw as we moved away from the trees. I do not have any GREAT shots of it (night time), but do have some nonetheless. Kiel's video shows there might have been two at one point, but I only saw one at the time, and it kept me from being empty handed.

Oh, and yeah, that Saturday night we slept in Derby again for a possible chase on the 13th (but was coldie pooled). The next morning Kiel had found that the cats had peed in his bag onhis stuff and left Pete and my things alone. Those cats know what is up!!!!