Started the morning up in Garden City after the Leoti storm.  Target was pretty easy, south into the Texas Panhandle, so away we went.  We headed south out of Garden, then cut down to Dumas, Texas and sat around there for a couple hours, grabbing lunch, getting a part for the van at the O’Reilly’s in town, and gassing up ahead of our chase.

A cell popped up east of Dumas, so we headed out TX-152 toward Stinnett, then up TX-207 toward Spearman where we did a quick gas top-off in town before zipping south on FM-760 three miles to CR-Y to watch a storm that was trying like hell to get itself together.  Early cycles of the storm were unsuccessful, and given the relatively slow movement, we once again opted to sample some hail in the core.

New cores were developing south of our main storm, and they would collide into our storm.  Seemed like every new cycle brought out storm closer and closer to tornadoing, but just as the RFD would swing around, another cell would collide and interrupt the process, leaving us waiting for the next opportunity.  By this point, we had navigated south out of the core, drifting east along with the cell along FM-281, stopping just on the other side of the county line about 10 miles southeast of Spearman.

As we sat there waiting, a few really vivid lightning strikes would pop out from the storm.  I tried to capture a few, but only managed one good capture out of it.

Merger after merger continued, and we bounced around there on FM-281 dodging hail cores and trying to keep view of the tornadic area of our storm.  Watching the radar loop, a final core had developed south of our storm, and I immediately knew that as soon as that storm merged with ours, it would be clear of further mergers and we probably would finally get our show to go.

Just as I called it, the final core merged into our storm, and with nothing left to interfere, we watched as the next RFD cycle was underway.  This time, nothing stopped it, and we got our first tornado way off to our west.

I have to admit being a little surprised this was going on as I was not expecting this to happen so far west.  My immediate focus prior to this was directly ahead of us to our north, and with good reason.  Multiple attempts at funnels and a tornado were occurring, all while simultaneously that cone was ongoing to our west.

Meanwhile as we sat there, our initial larger tornado was progressing in our direction, getting into better contrast.

The storm continued to move in an easterly direction, so we did the same, documenting a new area of rotation and an eventual funnel cloud to our north.

We stopped about half a mile east of CR-10 on FM-281 when a second funnel came down next to the one we were tracking.

We found a turn-out on the north side of FM-281, so we turned into there and set ourselves up as a new tornado was developing back to our northwest.

That tornado was strong early, hitting a farm property up the road.  Some of the debris hit nearby powerlines, causing a bright power flash to emanate from the contact.

This tornado went to wedge mode pretty quickly, and was quite the sight to behold.

This thing transformed so seamlessly from the skinny little funnel at the start to this massive wedge tornado in the matter of a couple minutes.  But the more incredible show was to come as the tornado seemingly lost some of its condensation and became a large, multi-CONE tornado.  Yes, the parent circulation was rotating full-fledged cones around the outside, with multiple vorticies down at the same time.

This thing was a beast, and the show it put on was stunning.  It would finally let up, and we’d continue east to TX-70 and head northbound.  About halfway to FM-759, we observed our final tornado of the day to our northwest.

The storm at this point was starting to go pretty HP, making it hard to get a solid view into the area of concern.  We poked down on a couple other cells to our southeast, but called the chase down in Canadian where we gassed up and pointed ourselves back north, heading up to Perryton for the night.

Two for two in the new van, just an unbelievable start to this trip; five tornadoes today making a total of SEVEN in the van’s first two days out.  And we’re just getting started as we have a couple more days left in this system.