featuring Connor Mockett
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to another week of Life with Connor the Weatherman. This week, I’m continuing the stories from my storm chasing adventure in Tornado Alley in the United States. This week I will continue on the journey and talk about May 20th.
After arriving at our hotel in Goodland, Kansas very early in the morning on the 20th, we were able to sleep for about 7 hours and have a little bit of time to edit photos and videos from the tornadoes we’d seen the day before. We wanted to be on the road by 10:00am in order to get to our target storm area with plenty of time to spare, just in case we had to go somewhere else. We had our Super 8 hotel breakfast (the sausages were fantastic), packed up, and hit the road.
We hopped onto I-70, westbound into Colorado towards the Denver area, ended up stopping for lunch with the chase team about an hour away from Denver, in Limon, Colorado, and watched storms start to develop along the Foothills from the comfort of our restaurant booth while stuffing our faces with a really tasty burger. Doesn’t get much better than that! We then hit the road and headed north to a little area called Last Chance, Colorado, a little abandoned area at an intersection of two highways.
During those few hours, an unbelievable amount of other storm chasers all converged on this one intersection to wait for the same storm. At one point, there were 40 storm chasers sitting in the same pull-off by this little intersection. I knew I’d see that many chasers eventually, but it’s a different experience when you actually see it with your own eyes versus seeing it online in photos. After a couple hours of waiting, the storm we wanted was in sight, so we hit the road to go further north to get a closer visual of it.
Almost immediately upon arrival to the storm, it really started to take off, strength wise and photogenic-ness wise. A gorgeous supercell was developing over beautiful green Colorado fields near Akron, Colorado. Shortly after its development, the rotation started and also picked up quickly. We got back in the vehicles and headed north and then east to keep up with the storm on some dirt roads. At this point, there were chasers absolutely everywhere, parked on the side of the roads or just in a really long line of traffic. Thankfully we were leading the line of vehicles, so we didn’t get stuck in it and were able to keep up with the storm.
At this point, the storm was crazy gorgeous. It had a shape on the backside that I’d never seen before. The colour was such a vibrant blue that you couldn’t miss what was happening. This is also when rotation was strongest. After stopping for some photos really quickly and to watch the rotation, which was almost right above us, we kept on going east on a dirt road when I looked out my left passenger window and said “on the ground!”. A brief tornado had just dropped to the ground, and its vortices were dancing in the tornado for a super short amount of time. Not many people even saw the tornado happen because it was so quick, and the funnel never fully came down to the ground.
After that tornado, the storm started to get interactions with other storms around, and went extremely high in precipitation to where you couldn’t see the circulation inside the storm anymore without having to be inside the storm blasting out your windshield from the hail. It was also getting dark out now, so it was very hard to see. During this portion of the storm’s lifespan, the hail core on the storm was so drastic, it dropped 15 centimeters of hail (yes, 15 centimeters) on a town called Yuma, Colorado, and severely damaged a lot of buildings from the golf ball or higher sized hailstones.
We ended up leaving the storm late at night, around 11:00pm, because it was too dangerous to keep chasing at night with the wind and the amount of hail it was throwing around. After we left the storm, we started the drive to our target for the next day on May 21st… Iowa!
The story of Iowa and the drive leading up to it will be told in the next Life with Connor the Weatherman column in a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you all soon!
