We embarked on our second trip to the USA to chase extreme storms and hopefully, see the odd tornado or two. We left Heathrow on the 29th May and returned on the 9th June.
We were delighted that our buddy, Ian Thompson, came with us this time. He was a storm ‘newbie’ and eager to experience severe weather. We’d booked on two tours with Silver Lining Tours (SLT), Tour 5 and Tour 6. These were both 6-day excursions leaving from, and returning to, Denver in Colorado.
Storm Chasing is a fairly safe pastime, but it does have inherent risk as we were to discover all too soon. Our aim was to enjoy the camaraderie of the vans we toured in, to see extreme weather and to soak up the atmosphere of little visited areas of the US. It was of course, an excuse to take some awesome pictures along the way.
The resulting pages are extracts from a diary we kept for the whole 17 days of our trip…
Enjoying some down time in Denver
Bonus Chase Day
We’d been emailed by Roger Hill the day before to tell us he would be offering a bonus chase day on the Saturday 25th. We enthusiastically responded saying we were in, we weren’t going to miss out ‘just in case’!
I couldn’t sleep beyond 3:30am on Saturday and therefore fidgeted and managed to wake Hels by 5:30 so neither of us felt very refreshed. However, we were excited, so we got up and were ready to leave by 7:30am
Hels used her new “Lyft” cab ordering app and we were told our black Audi A4 was waiting for us after only 4 minutes. Only, he was nowhere to be seen. After another 5 mins of waiting he ‘left’ costing us $5! Brilliant. We got in a Yellow Cab outside the hotel and for nearly double the price, we were off back towards the airport and our hotel for the night to meet Roger and the gang.
We met a few of our fellow chasers in the lobby and were all excited to see where we’d be heading for the day’s chase. As it turned out, we were off towards Lamar in the S/E corner of Colorado. This was a 2.5 hour drive and we were informed we needed to leg it down there as storms were likely to kick off early.
We left around 10:15 and set off with two vans. We had 7 people in our van and that immediately took us right back to our previous trip and the daily ‘fight’ for the right van and people to be with.
We stopped off for lunch in Lamar and we remembered the joys of eating while storm chasing. A balanced diet is almost impossible and already we’d consumed more crap than we’ve had since the start of the year.
From a stop in Lamar we headed down towards Boise City and a nice looking, developing storm near Manter, Kansas. We took a back road and came to an abrupt halt as the road degenerated into dirt and it was already hailing. The storm looked interesting and we waited for about 30 mins in differing intensities of rain before heading back where we’d come from to find a way of leap-frogging the storm. The small village we’d just come through was now under 2-feet of water and we were driving along small rivers as the storm had deluged the area. We continued in the torrential rain, hitting heavy side winds as the rain reduced visibility to around 100 feet all around us.
When we reached the other side, it was apparent the storm had lost any intensity and form and was a bust for cellular or tornadic potential. We trudged back to Lamar for another stop before the long haul back to Denver. We covered over 750 miles and 9 hours travelling. When we got back to the hotel, we were all shattered and went straight to bed.
Despite the storm ending in a bust, the colours and the dramatic formation was totally awesome!
The 9 hour drive proved too much for Ian (what became a familiar sight for us during the trip!)
Squash Imagery 