Chris Brown is the Lanky Git

Day 4 – Storm Day!

Keystone, South Dakota

Today I learnt that waking up at 5,000 feet above sea level with a hangover isn’t the greatest feeling in the world. I headed off to breakfast in the hope that the fried food and coffee would settle my stomach and stop everything from spinning. It didn’t, which was unfortunate, as today was my turn to ride in the back of the SUV. This was a job for my trusty travel sick pills – Kwells.

First stopped of the day was Starbucks! Or as Todd put it, our last chance for a real coffee until we start coming south again. A quick caffeine and cash point/ATM stop and we were back on the road again, heading north towards North Dakota and into west Montana.

During the course of the week Todd had been telling us about a town up in these parts where bikers from all over the USA converged each summer for a weekend of music, beer and apparently, drunken nakedness. So as it was en-route, we made a dive off of the highway into the town of Sturgis, South Dakota. It certainly was a biker town, I have never seen so many Harley Davidson’s in one place at the same time. A quick visit to a ‘real’ bikers bar and we were off again.

The target area for today was just inside Eastern Montana, around the town of Baxter. The forecasts were good for some isolated supercell activity, and with us chasers so far being completely storm deprived we were ready for some action! It was around about 4 in the afternoon when we arrived in Baxter. Another snack/fuel/toilet break and we were heading north towards some very dark looking clouds. Inside the car we had a laptop set up which was always showing live Doppler weather radar and this storm was starting to grow with certain parts being covered by red squares (see image), which indicated thunderstorm warnings. However, what we were looking for was icons indicating cloud rotation and purple areas, which would show a tornado warning.

Without warning Todd pulled into the entrance of a dirt road and said we would be waiting for a bit to see what happens. Being our first proper storm, we all clambered out of the SUV and intently all stood staring at the sky. It was like something from a Sci Fi movie. Todd knowing better stayed in the SUV watching the radar and weather warnings. Ten more minutes and he announced we were going to get closer. Another, roadside stop and we actually saw our first wall cloud. It was about 3 miles away and moving to east. Once again we piled back in the SUV and drove another mile or so north. Now things were getting exciting, the radar was not only show strong rotation – which we could actually see now, it had just pinged up with a tornado warning! The sky was really darkening now and you could clearly see the clouds rotating and sucking in more clouds from around it, the core was also visible no more than a mile away and closing, Todd pointed out that what we could see was the hail falling from the core, which was about 2-3 inches in diameter. After about 30 minutes the wall cloud was no more than ¼ mile away and because the rain was starting to fall a bit heavier, Todd decided to move us back south away from the approaching hail.

The next stop is one of the memorable ones of the trip. We had positioned ourselves about 1-2 miles away and we could now see the storm cell that we had been stood under in its entirety. It was a monster. We spent 20 minutes enjoying the view and still hoping that the Tornado warning would come to fruition, sadly it did not. It was while watching from this vantage point that Todd suddenly ordered us all in the SUV before he took off down the road at break neck speed. He said that the hail – now showing as baseball size = was wrapping around us and if we didn’t get out from under the storm we would be cut off by some rather large chunks of ice falling from the sky.

As the storm moved southeast it was weakening on the radar and was become less dangerous, however the Arcus Cloud that had formed in front of the storm was a sight to behold. Todd decided to position us so that the storm could come towards and pass over us, with the aim being that the now weaken core should drop its quarter size (10 pence) size hail on us – we would be in the car of course. When it hails out here the temperature can go from 80f+ to low 50’s very quickly and the landscape is left looking like it has a fresh dusting of snow, which is sometimes inches deep. The core missed us, so we were off to chase it down. Having been pelted by the hail, rain and wind we made a beeline for North Dakota. Our most northerly overnight stop in Belfield, North Dakota was to have us just a couple of hours drive from the borders of Canada.

Today had been long day, that wasn’t helped by the late night before, however we had one last photo stop to make. As we drove north with the sun setting to the west and the storm moving east, we were presented with the most glorious sunset I have ever seen. The pictures really don’t show how orange the sky was – spectacular.

We were all now officially bitten by the storm chasing bug but we only had a few more days left to hunt down the holy grail of storm chasing – the Tornado.

Storm Chasing