Escaping a blizzard and positioning ourselves for a bigger day in Texas; today was a chase of convenience to get into position for the next day which would be moderate’d in the SPC Day 2 Outlook. First thing was first, the sleeper day!
We left Denver Wednesday night for Amarillo where we rolled into our hotel at 2:30am. We checked the data quickly before passing out. We were pretty much in our target area. We got up and took our time getting out; milking the late check-out til noon as Kanani Bright met us to hang. We killed some time at Wal-Mart, then met with Jay McCoy at Olive Garden before finally moving south to Plainview.
From there, we sat around as I remounted a couple of things to make the Jottodesk and laptop a bit easier on the passenger. Kanani and Jay joined us and we were soon on the road. We intercepted our first storm north of Plainview, then dropped back south to get on another forming storm which quickly crapped out. Back north we ran, then over into Caprock Canyon where the isolated storm got sucked into the forming MCS and cored us with nickel hail, blinding rains, and high winds.
Kanani and Jay headed back to AMA and we hit 287 at Memphis to get ahead of the MCS and shoot lightning… boy did we nuke some good shots! We moved south when we got nailed with rain and stopped again 15 minutes later to shoot the last of the lightning before heading into Wichita Falls ending our day at 11:30pm to gawk at our lightning shots and rest up for Friday!
Meeting with Jay and Kanani at the Plainview Best Western.
We followed the storms off the Caprock, eventually getting up toward Memphis where the light show kicked off in earnest. The three shots below were the top three of the night, hands down. Mainly cause they were actually in focus.
The ones below would’ve been nice had I had them in focus. But I’ll share them anyway as proof this storm was awesome!
After the lightning became uncooperative, we hauled up to Wichita Falls for the night, getting in just before midnight to rest up for what was to be a busy next day.
