Tim and I departed his place in Denver and drove out I-70 to meet with the rest of the crew in Kansas ahead of what was looking to be a pretty solid play there along I-70.
With the initiation zone setting up near I-70, we got set up on a rural road and waited.
Our target storm went up later that afternoon south of the Hill City area.
The storm continued to strengthen and started to rotate. We got our crews spaced out and Tim and I went in.
We get into the core with some barely severe-criteria hail.
Southwest of Hill City on a dirt road, we catch views of a tornado to our north.
We were forced to stop our intercept as the road we were on became too muddy and partially flooded out. There was no way we could safely proceed, so we stopped to watch the tornado.
We managed to get back to pavement, taking on a little more bleh hail in the process.
We pursued this storm a little further east, eventually ending up back on I-70 at Hays where we stopped at a gas station as the cluster of storms approached. During our stop, tornado sirens erupted, alerting us to one of the storms getting tornado-warned as it ran at us.
We got back in front of the storm on I-70 and stayed with it til we hit Russell where we opted to drop south and get out of the way, ultimately ending up in Great Bend, Kansas where we opted to bunk down for the night. But it was late and we were hungry, and the only thing open were fast food drive-thrus. Unfortunately, none of our mesonet vehicles fit under drive-thrus, so we had to beg the people there to feed us on foot.
