I’d completely forgotten about this trip until Heather reminded me yesterday. As such, my recollections about this day are a little fuzzy.
After the events of August 11th, I realized that we might be able to squeak a chase day out before the end of summer. That is, if I bothered to pay attention to what was going on around us. We didn’t have time for an extended chase trip, but maybe we could get something close to home.
I started checking the SPC page daily, looking for any hint of severe weather in our immediate neighborhood, and August 17th popped out as a potential target. Looking at a map, the highest probability for success seem to be right around Limon, since we could use route 71 to move north and south fairly quickly to pick targets, and I-70E to escape east if needed.
We left a little too late in the day, but I can’t remember why. I do know that we had croissants for some odd reason. Yeah, that’s about on par for my memory.
Man, those croissants were delicious.
We left Centennial via Arapahoe Rd, heading east and continuing east down County Line Rd. Unfortunately I did not have the GPS tracker app running on my phone, so I don’t know our exact path. We ended up a little north of Kiowa, directly in the clear space in-between two supercells. The northern storm was further ahead and was speeding away to the northeast, but I thought the southern cell was reachable if we could get ahead of it and then race south. Or we could core punch it.
At this point I feel no embarrassment to admit that I was too new to be core punching anything. Also, there was clearly hail in the storm, and Heather probably likes her windows.
A wise decision, since that storm went tornado warned about 5-10 minutes later.
It dropped a brief tornado somewhere south of Kiowa, then a funnel cloud right near Limon. The velocity signatures looked very impressive on Radarscope near Limon, but to my knowledge they never got a full tornado. A couple of brief tornadoes were reported near Genoa, just to the east of Limon.
Here’s a few accounts of this event by chasers who were in much better positions than we were.
All in all, I was pretty happy to just get out there and chase something. I was also happy that I had selected a good target, though it practically had a bulls-eye drawn on it. We are pretty light on pictures for this trip, since we spent most of our time meandering around deciding on how far we wanted to go.
Baby steps.
