This was a long haul for a one-day chase, and when it was all said and done, ended up being in the top 3 of my longest mileage chases on record.
Ed Grubb and myself departed the Denver are a couple days before, heading to Amarillo for the first night. There was a risk for severe weather on November 3, the day before the main event, so we left on the 2nd to set up in Amarillo in case storms did fire. Most of the risk for storms on the 3rd was going to be late, so we did not have huge expectations for a chase. Seeing as storms did NOT fire for us, this just ended up being a two-day haul over to Denton to set up for the main event on the 4th, splitting what would’ve otherwise been a 14-hour haul from Colorado.
We did the drive from Amarillo to Denver on the 3rd, never really expecting to chase, and that worked out fine as we got in to Denton relatively early. A good night’s rest set us up nicely as we awakened early the morning of, doing final checks on the ride before we got moving. It was a mild, but cloudy start to the day, but definitely felt like a tornado day.
Our first storm intercept took us east from Denton along US-380. It was a severe storm approaching the Farmersville area. It looked pretty decent, and came with some hail, so an early successful storm intercept, but the tornado potential was only starting to ramp up.
As this storm pushed north, our attention turned to the storms to our south. One in particular really grabbed our attention coming up from the Canton area. We had a great route to it, just a question of whether we would beat it to our intercept point. We shot east on US–380 toward Greenville, then cut southeast on US-69 toward Emory. The hope was to beat the storm there, and fortunately we did, getting into town, then turning back north/northeast on TX-19 where we watched the storm move nearly parallel to the route.
We paced it up TX-19, watching as the area of interest got more organized.
Terrain, namely the trees, were an issue as we didn’t have the luxury of being able to stop in one place with a view as we had to keep moving. The storm was hauling at nearly freeway speeds, so we were on the move a good majority of the time. Finally, somewhere near FM-1567, we got our first view of the tornado.
We were fortunate to be close enough where when we DID find a decent view, we could stop long enough to shoot it. Timing worked out well as the tornado was clearly at its peak, and we were able to watch and report LIVE on the AccuWeather Network as this tornado made a run at Sulphur Springs.
As the storm continued to race northeast, we also returned to the race, moving along TX-19 with the tornado almost due north of us. Trees continued to hamper the view, and we lost track of it behind some trees as we were waiting for it to cross the highway directly in front of us.
Our final looks indicated that it might be roping out, and that was confirmed as we never saw it cross the road. We assume it dissipated after we lost sight of it, and later damage tracks indicate the tornado lifted prior to it crossing the highway.
Our storm moved through Sulphur Springs, fortunately never producing another tornado. We plucked a couple other cells, but our chase quickly wound down. We ended up heading toward Paris as reports of significant tornadoes up that way kept us in play, but with darkness falling, we elected to call it a day and stay in Paris for the night at a shady hotel that certainly offered a more frightening environment than any storms we chased.
The following morning, we were up before the sun doing damage reports for the Network north of Paris as one of two EF-4 tornadoes moved through that area. We focused in on the Midcity area, documenting and reporting on the damage and cleanup of that tornado.
It was a long haul back to Colorado as the system did not offer other opportunities, and with a potential tropical system in the near future, I wanted to get home and rested in case I was to be deployed to the coast for a LATE season tropical intercept. All said, a chase that logged over 2,200 miles, one of the longest single chases of my career, and one of only a couple that hit the 2,000 mile mark. Had the day before panned out, it would’ve technically split the miles a bit, but this all ended up being for this one event.
November continues to be a very successful month for me. While I don’t have a ton of chases in the month, most of those chases yield impressive, high-end tornado events. This event added to that list.
