Waking up in Fort Morgan, Colorado feeling pretty good after the previous night’s amazing little lightning show.  Pretty chill morning, waking up pretty much in the target zone makes for an easy day, so I milked the room til checkout.  I did some shooting for my Weather Warrior series as I packed up and loaded myself up and got ready to head out.

After dinking around the area for a bit, I decided to grab some lunch at the Brush Wendy’s, then worked my way east toward cells that were firing closer to the Colorado state line. I took US-34 to Yuma, then south of Yuma via CO-59, documenting a couple of the early storms north of Joes, Colorado.

I jumped all the way down to US-36, then cut east toward Idalia, dropping south on US-385 to go play in the hail.  Early on, the stones were approaching golfball size, but as the heavier core rolled in, hail size went down to about quarters.

Would you believe me if I told you I was considering canning the rest of the day. I wasn’t really feeling my storms and I had just seen imagery of a fairly significant tornado had touched down literally a few miles west of the hotel I left that morning, one of several that came down on early storms in that area.  A classic ‘never leave the hotel’ event.  But I went for the ‘better air’, more discrete storms to the east and of course the storms to the west would go off.

A new SPC MD kept me from quitting on the day.  They mentioned that storms in the area would see increasing tornado potential.  About this time, storms to the north were going pretty good, and a reported tornado south of Eckley grabbed my attention enough to spin me about face and sent me rolling up US-385.  I had about an hour to think about the day to this point, which had not been going great for me, but when it’s May, you chase!

When I cleared the storms I was fiddling with, I started to get a view of the cells to my north… ‘not bad’, I thought as I stopped about 14 miles south of Wray on US-385 to observe and take some pictures.

A lot of dust was being kicked up with this storm, nothing rotating, but certainly creating a scene west of the highway south of Wray.

I made one final stop along the way to observe some of the dust and noticed some turbulence in the cloud base getting a little better organized just off to my northwest.  I continued northbound and was watching another area of dust plumage to my due north just before the highway makes a short dogleg to the east.  It looked like it had some rotation with it as well.

I tracked this feature east that mile before re-curving back to the north.  The dust whirl continued, albeit much weaker and lower to the ground, but there was A LOT of motion in the clouds above.  I got about two miles north to CR-32 and pulled off to observe what was now a full-on cinnamon bun in the clouds.

Suddenly, the benign area of dust tightened up on the ground, and it seemed like the connection between the two swirls had just been made.

You could count them, FIVE telephone poles to my west, a large, dusty, likely a landspout tornado was developing.  It grew from a pretty moot area of dust to this massive dust bowl that grew pretty huge from my point of view less than 1/4 mile east.

Well that was awesome!  An incredible close intercept of a pretty hefty looking landspout.  Certainly no one else was anywhere close as most of the chasing conglomerate was closer to Wray up along US-34.  Fortunately for them (and unbeknownst to me), a much better show was about to begin.

As the storm itself was moving just east of north, I decided to continue eastbound on CR-32.  I got a couple miles down the road when I looked to my northwest and saw the initial funnel of the Wray tornado.  I quickly stopped and got out to shoot.

It was clear this was probably going to be down a while, and I knew I needed to get north.  So I hopped back in the car, took the next northbound road at County Road LL, and flew north on dirt as this tornado gathered strength.

It was at this point I knew I had to suck-up my positioning, having gone about two and a half miles north of CR-32, I just settled on a high-spot, pulling off just south of CR-35 and making the best of what was an amazing tornado.

As mentioned in the gallery, these photos were SIGNIFICANTLY enhanced.  My view was not very good.  The sunlight was blowing out my foreground and drowning out the tornado in the background.  Below is a honest image of what my camera captured, which does give a better idea of the view I did have.

With the tornado still ongoing and showing no signs of slowing down, I decided since it continued to drift further into the background, I decided to make a run for it, hopping north to US-34 and cutting back west into town, going north on US-385 to get north of town.  Unfortunately there was no way to go just due north as a river ran along the north side of US-34 and no roads went north except US-385.  When I got about a mile or so north of town, I could see where the tornado had come through.  Emergency crews were arriving on-scene as I stopped.

Meanwhile, the tornado was STILL going on, now east of the road a couple miles to my north.

Despite the funnel kinda fizzling out, the rotation and ground circulation continued.  And within minutes, it seemed as if the tornado decided it was NOT done yet, fully condensing again as it churned off to the north/northeast.

Once the tornado finally went away for good, I sat there north of the airport as roadblocks prevented me from getting further north to the damage, or beyond just to try and stay with the storm.

I did a lot of my video editing from that point, waiting to see if I could get anywhere north of town.  After finishing my edits and sending out video to my respective people, I opted to hop on US-34 and start working my way to an overnight point.  With another chase looming across southern Kansas the following day, I hoofed my way over to Hays where I bunked down for the night.

Despite my less-than-ideal viewing location of the main Wray tornado, my video went out to several major networks, including The Weather Channel, ABC, and NBC.  I had included scenes from the first tornado plus some of the structure shots, which I’m sure helped me out a bit.

It’s a weird chase in my brain… having quite the roller coaster from missing the tornadoes near my morning hotel and hearing of the first tornado prior to the Wray sequences.  I wasn’t at my best.  But because of all that, I kinda dumb-lucked my way into the first landspout there south of Wray, which was definitely the highlight of the day for me being I was so incredibly close and it just kinda happened right there in front of me.  As I mentioned earlier, most chasers were well north, and were about to do just fine on their own, and clearly there is no content which of these two tornadoes I would have rather had the better view of, but it’s a helluva consolation prize and it wasn’t like I missed Wray, just wasn’t enjoying the stellar views that everyone else was getting.  The photos, while heavily doctored to bring the tornado out a bit, aren’t bad.  It’s worthy of the wall, just not a super huge, detailed poster-print haha

Still, it was a highlight for early May, certainly a top Colorado tornado chase day.  While I would’ve preferred the closer, higher-contrast view of the Wray EF-2, it’s hard to argue with the close dusty landspout.  I suppose if I just got back on US-385 and blasted north, I could’ve had the best of both worlds, but I got ahead of myself, one of my faults, sometimes trying to out-think myself and get ahead, and often putting myself further than if I had just taken the direct route as opposed to try and anticipate where the storm will go next.

In the end, I made it work.  One really close, dusty monster landspout and a beautiful Colorado tornado that I had to do a little work on the backend to bring out.  None-the-less, a solid day, one I’m very happy with in the end.