After flying back from Colorado Wednesday morning, I arrrived in OKC to see the models had sucked the life out of this day. As a result, the heard of Colorado-based chasers backed out leaving only Ed Grubb to meet us. Carl and I picked up Tom in OKC and drove down to Lawton to setup for Thursday. We originally had Wichita Falls as an overnight target, but elected to keep a northern target open just in case. Turns out Lawton provided some great laughs, but we never ventured into Oklahoma for chasing once we dove south of the Red River. We made a brief retreat into OKC to get on our first storm, but quickly turned back south into Texas where we would remain the rest of the day.
Meanwhile, I woke up Thursday morning to a pair of cops parked around my van.
And not long after that, the State of Oklahoma Corrections Department arrived…
We had breakfast at the hotel’s resturant and waited for Ed to arrive from his overnight stay in Amarillo. Once he arrived, we put in the chair he graciously hauled out for my van and got Tom set up with something that wasn’t so dangerous with my driving. From there, we headed down to Wichita Falls where I hit a mile-stone on my van.
We stopped in Ringgold, Texas and spent the good part of the afternoon awaiting initiation at a Texas Historical Marker. Carl is seen here in a rare appearance NOT looking at data on a laptop.
The historical marker was a good place to sit and wait around for storms to fire.
Meanwhile, Ed found some interesting trash and decided to have a little fun…
A storm finally broke through, so we took off. Heading southwest towards developing cells and got behind this. This was the sign that the day was doomed… we were tanked.
We attemped to get back in front of this storm, but it caught us before we could get in front of it. The core dumping golfballs had us slammed to a stop. Ed in the other vehicle attempted to “run away like a rabbit”, but found a curtain of bigger hail.
Meanwhile, had Ed just stayed with us, he probably would’ve been fine. He bragged last year about how he had chased in his old truck for a dozen years and never had dented her in hail. So here in his first chase in the new truck… SLAM!
We hear back from Randy and he took baseballs and severely dented his van. All his windows were in tact, but the body was heavily damaged along with a 2 inch cave-in of the roof. We eventually headed southwest to Jacksboro on the best hope for tornadic action on the day.
I figure out as we’re sitting here that I lost my HAM antenna in the earlier hailstorm as I was unable to send or receive transmissions or NWS WX channels. Fortunately I had the backup and was able to use it the remainder of the day. We continue to follow the storm for a bit and enjoy a scenic rainbow and sunset…
As the chase day came to an end, Ed split off and bunked down in Wichita Falls and I ventured back into Oklahoma to drop Tom off in OKC and Carl off in Tulsa. I would bunk down overnight in Blackwell, Oklahoma and drive back to Denver via I-70 in Kansas on Friday.
This chase has major significance in my career stats as I hit the 100,000 career mile mark. This was done on my way into Tulsa on I-44 as I went to drop Carl off. The chase when it wrapped up left me just under 9,000 miles so far for the season and a few hundred miles shy of 101,000 career.
