After yesterday’s excitement we were grounded until we could get out windows repaired. What first was going to be a slight delay in our departure turned into a series of unfortunate events and we were unable to get the van back until 3:00pm which gave us a late start for chasing the cells heading east through Wyoming towards Nebraska. I have to say that our storm chase team, Brian Morganti & Keith Brown gave it their best shot to catch up with the storm. It looked promising at first as the storm was moving due east at about 25 kph and we were gaining on it. But, then it took a turn to the southeast and picked up speed putting us right in the core of the storm which is not where you want to be. We were slowed down by pouring rain and yeap, more hail. We were a little gun shy of hail after yesterday and it was getting bigger, so we turned south trying to out-run the storm to no avail as there was a southern cell that was catching up to us. So, we turned back to the north and headed to Yuma, CO to re-group and figure out a strategy. It became apparent that we were not going to be able to get ahead of the storm and it was getting late so, we decided to hang back and get the back side of the storm and position ourselves for tomorrow. We began heading north and shortly the rain stopped, the clouds began to break up and we were treated to some beautiful Mammatus clouds…
Fran found some hail left over from the storm…
Photographing nature can be a slam dunk like yesterday when we were on tornados within a couple of hours of leaving Denver or, you can get skunked like we did. It’s never a total loss…we had a great time chasing the storm and were able to capture some beautiful cloud patterns of the back of the storm. We are in a good position to chase today’s storms…stay tuned!
Images captured with Nikon D3S, AF-S 70-200mm VR II on Lexar Digital Media
