May 26-28 log

On Thursday, we did not chase- we just hung out in the Albuquerque area, had lunch with chaser Scott Fitzgerald, and hiked in Petroglyph National Monument.

Friday was a very eventful day. We saw that there was a pretty good chance of supercells in the Las Vegas area- so we took off at about noon, After getting onto I 25 near Santa Fe, we could see explosive towers to the east and NE. We stopped near Bernal as a HP supercell was just to the north- with a menacing shelf cloud heading right for us. I then made a fateful decision- why not see what kind of hail was in this storm- given what I knew about the situation that day, I figured that we would see stones up to maybe golf ball size- and if we got a couple of dents, no big deal. However, this turned out to be a fatal error- as I was indeed right about the size of the hailstones- but not the number. We soon were sitting in a barrage of golf ball hail- which lasted a good five minutes. Luckily the window glass survived, but the hood and top have dozens of small to medium dents, and the tail lights have many cracks. Oh well, that's chasing- and I did get easily the best hail video I have personally shot.

We then could not really drop south easily to keep up with this storm, so we decided to go north on the interstate. Just north of Las Vegas, we ran into another hailstorm- this time pea to marble sized- but it covered the interstate enough that many people slid off into the ditch.

Then we just basically headed for Clayton, as there were too many storms firing up to have any good supercells- but we did get a few nice pictures of the storms over the high prairies- and we ran into two more hailstorms.

Saturday we had a decision- go to the chase party, or chase in Colorado. After looking at the data, we decided to chase- and in hindsight maybe it was a bad decision, but what the heck. We went to Lamar, saw towers to the north, and went to near Cheyenne Wells- heard of a tornado warning near Goodland, but decided that was not worth going after. A storm was ongoing to the north- it was not really a supercell- but was pretty with a rain free base. We stopped south of Sharon Springs, for a half hour or so- and watched the storm until it died, then headed back t Guymon. Not a total bust, since I got a few nice photos.

Photos here


Matt