First intercept of the day came on a storm across northern Kansas that I picked up west of Phillipsburg along US-36 that was warned for hail. I knew the tornado threat would be low, and this storm certainly never provided any hint that it may try to spin something down. It was all about the ice.
I stayed just ahead of the storm until I got into Phillipsburg-proper where I set up for a core intercept.
US-36 dips southeast onto the west side of town, and right there is a Econo Lodge motel, where I pulled into the open parking lot and waited as the hail came in. And boy did it, covering the ground with 1-1.25″ stones in a hefty core that was slow to get out of town.
I punched back out the east side of the storm, staying on US-36 and keeping pace with it. A few times, the structure looked really good, so I put a little distance between me and the storm to really take in the full structure.
With a little distance between me and the storm, and a slightly more north-of-east path, the main brunt of this storm was going to stay north of US-36 and Smith Center, so I decided to head north on KS-8 heading up toward the border south of Franklin, NE. As I closed in on the state line, I got re-entangled in the hail core which was still coming down heavy enough to cover the roads.
I stopped north of the border to get out and measure the hail size, this time a bit more spikey than what I saw earlier.
My favorite part of the chase was to come as the sun started to set and we approached the golden hour with autumn colors and lightning on the backside of the storm. I found a somewhat scenic foreground just south of Franklin, Nebraska and tried to capture some of that lightning on photo. That didn’t go so well, but the video stills pulled were pretty good, particularly when a rainbow appeared.
I probably spent a good hour in that area, trying to eek out any imagery I could get during this scenic scene. Obviously as the storm slowly pulled away, so did the scenic shots as well as the remaining daylight. A few storms off to my north gave me some hope that perhaps I could steal a lightning photo or two, but that was not to be the case. I went ahead and pointed myself to Kearney for the night, very satisfied over this late season chase.
