Mike B. Storm Chasing 2012: Day 10: Eve Delivers!

If there is one thing I learned from this trip.....its that I need a new camera. The pictures I took do this no justice.

We got pretty lucky, we were again split on what to do and agreed to go north out of Fort Collins to Cheyenne, WY and reassess. As we were waiting in the McD's I noticed Dr. P. intensely examining the radar, but I refused to get my hopes about seeing anything today and continued doing what I was doing. We got on the road and headed north up I-25 and about 30 mins north, the radar indicated that the storm we were driving to had a hook on the radar. I still refused to get excited about the storm and continued playing my game.

The excitement was starting to build in the van and we were all trying to stay distracted incase we didn't see anything. Then...out of nowhere, Dr. P. yells "LOOK, THERE IT IS! LOOK LOOK!" And 10 miles ahead near Wheatland, WY, sure enough there was a large tornado straight ahead, I think they heard the screams from our van back in Denver. We pulled over and got out and started snapping pictures of Tornado #1.

After some pictures we decided to move a little closer and we all hopped in the van and headed a few miles closer to the storm. We took some more pictures and one of our group who is doing their thesis on Tornados got some atmospheric readings. There were people pulled over on the side of the road and for some reason there were still people driving into the tornado that was heading straight for the interstate...you have to wonder what some of these people are thinking.

As we started to get back in the van, the tornado became rain wrapped. We turned around and moved back south to a safer position and spotted a 2nd tornado. I didn't get to see it due to my position in the van and we couldn't get out because we needed to haul ass to get to an even safer position. However people had jammed themselves under the overpass where we were and we had to get them out of the way. IF A TORNADO IS COMING YOUR WAY, THE OVERPASS IS THE WORST PLACE FOR YOU TO BE! It provides no protection and actually amplifies the winds (acts as a wind tunnel.) If you are in a car and a tornado is bearing down on you, drive as fast as possible away from it. If you can't drive away from it, get out and lie down in a ditch. We informed people of this fact and some of them moved (read: asked us where we were moving to and then hauled ass behind us out of there). Of course we had to tell them we were meteorologists for them to actually listen.

We moved to another position a little further north and then went East to get to a better vantage point. It was at this point we watched Tornado #3 start to form, touch down and then dissipate at the wall cloud it was attached to went away. This bad boy ended up being a Large wedge tornado which was pretty cool. It was one of the coolest things I have seen in my whole life and the tornado high we were on lasted until the hotel at midnight.

Heading back to the interstate, we saw hail lying on the ground like it had just snowed. We got out and looked at some stones and there were a few 2 inch hail stones. These things are huge. Sure, you think 2 inches isn't that big, but when you see them in your hand....these are impressive little buggers when you think about the speed of the updraft that is required to keep a stone of this size suspended in the cloud long enough to get that big.

We were pretty lucky today. The storm was crossing the road we happened to be on and the tornados all occurred in a pretty remote area so there were not any injuries that we know of and only a few structures were damaged.

OMG THIS WAS SO AMAZING!

PS: Video will be coming as soon as I get to better wireless. I have a video of the 3rd tornado forming. Plus other people I am traveling with have vids too.

EDIT 6/10/12: Pics from Chris Iragi and Danielle Laflamme

Tornado 1 photo by Chris Iragi