A photographer’s dream chase set in the gorgeous high plains of eastern Wyoming as a long-lived supercell dropped a tornado that lasted 30 minutes across the lush green landscape. With Vortex2 along with TWISTEX on this storm, it became the most studied single tornado in history.
The day started out in Denver as myself along with Tim Samaras, Carl Young in ‘Probe’ and Jeff Duda in ‘M2’, headed up I-25 toward Cheyenne, Wyoming for the target for the day. My personal target was sitting between Akron and Yuma, which given the events that would later unfold, was good that I was outvoted on that one! 🙂
SPC held a 10% tornado risk in the target area and we stopped in Cheyenne for lunch at Taco John’s and munched down while awaiting for the storms to unfold. A couple fired off the mountains and slowly started drifting east. They rapidly gained strength and quickly drew our attention along with the attention of just about every chaser within 400 miles!
We quickly wrapped up the grubbing and took off out of Cheyenne. We ventured east first along I-80 before darting north on a dirt road toward US-85. We could already see the developing wall cloud on this storm nearly 40 miles away.
We eventually made it to US-85 and started following the highway as the storm continued to organize. We began to spread out as Dr. Bruce Lee and Dr. Cathy Finley joined our group shortly before the storm really got its act together.
We continued north when the storm dropped the tornado for the first time..
The initial touchdown didn’t last long as the funnel persisted for a while before finally returning to the ground and growing into a large tornado very quickly.
The tornado continued on for what felt like an eternity, slowly dragging its way over to Us-85. I repositioned us several times, crawling north a mile at a time to get ourselves in position to deploy on this tornado. Its slow movement an occasional rain-wrapping made it tough to settle into a spot for deployment even as we enjoyed a lot of stand-still time taking pictures and video of this beautiful tornado.
The tornado finally crossed US-85 about 200 yards in front of us.
The best of the show was yet to come! As the tornado moved east of us, it began a beautiful 10-minute rope out in the field. The rope out, which began halfway through the tornado’s lifecycle about halfway up the vortex, was insane! With the tornado over open land with no way to get to it, we just sat back and enjoyed the amazing show!
But the day was far from done… after the tornado finally gave its last gasp, we ventured east into Nebraska where we were greeted with the backside of this monstrous storm as it started dumping very large hailstones on us. We waited for the storm to pass before continuing on.
So with the tornado and hail out of the way, structure took over! This storm morphed into a beautifully sculpted and very turbulent supercell that was just amazing to watch!
The storm raged on across western Kansas, dropping a landspout at some point to which we missed. However, given the earlier tornado in Wyoming, the massive hail at the border, and the absolutely INSANE structure, we were more than thrilled with this chase!
By day’s end, I had bagged my very first tornado in Wyoming and contributed to one of the most researched tornadoes in history! Without question, the best chase of 2009!
