Day 18: HOME!!

Today was our last day.  Took us about 6-7 hours to get home, but the drive seemed much shorter because the destination was so familiar.

Not gonna lie.. I'm glad the trip is over.  At the beginning of the trip I was sad we wouldn't be out in the field for longer... why not a full month of storm chasing?!  Or 2-3??  Now I know why... as fun as chasing can be, it involves a LOT of driving, and a LOT of patience from everyone involved.  18 days was long enough for me, and I think everyone else on the trip would agree.

Time to go back to reality.  I have a job to find, friends to catch up with, and my future after college to consider. I fulfilled my storm chasing dreams this summer.  I can smile and know that is completed now.  :)

Day 17: Close call, and by accident!

From Fargo, North Dakota we headed south-east.  The plan was to drive through Minnesota and into Wisconsin back toward Indiana.  Storms were set to fire in south-central Wisconsin, down through Iowa and into Nebraska.

While there would be storms, the problem was that there would not be enough rotating winds to form little distinct supercells which are best for chasing.  The storms that would fire would be individual at first, but as the evening went on the storms would clump together creating a huge squall line.  We were hoping that we could get to Wisconsin in time to see a few discrete cells before they built a line... 

Being in Minnesota was completely different from North Dakota... the landscape changed dramatically from flat grassy plains to dense, hilly forests.  Deciduous trees... they were everywhere!  Hadn't seen so many since we left Missouri a few weeks ago, it seems!  Minnesota would have been a terrible place to chase storms... and Wisconsin, we knew, wouldn't be much better.

As we drove through Wisconsin, heading south, I noticed a storm to our south that was starting to grow.   We stopped at a gas station and took a look at it's mammatus clouds... they were well-developed, and thought that this storm might be pretty intense.  However, there were still no shifting winds to make it spin... so a tornado didn't seem likely.

Our destination for dinner was Madison, Wisconsin.  The storm was headed straight that way, and most of us were so hungry that we would rather eat than try to chase a storm in a forested terrain, next to an urban area. So we knew we had to make a quick decision within 30 minutes and get inside a restaurant before a hail storm pommeled us.  

We ate in downtown Madison... most of the group went to an Irish pub, but I went with two other people a few stores down to a Subway, since it was cheaper and actually more in line with what I was hungry for.  As we sat in the store we noticed the clouds starting to get dark.  My friend and I looked at our radars on our phones... keeping an eye on the storm.  Suddenly my friend looked at an alert on his phone, and there was a Tornado warning for our area!  WHAAATT??  A funnel cloud had been spotted, heading east between [two places whose names I don't remember].  We asked the employees of Subway where those areas were, and they were like "Um, that's just west of here... that should be heading directly at us!"

Then my friend looked at his radar and noticed a couplet on the radar... oh crap!  He ran next door and told our professor, who was at the Irish pub, that a tornado was heading our way.  He came back, we told the employees of our Subway, and they locked the doors and we all waited.

Example picture of a "couplet". 

A doppler radar doesn't just detect rain... it also senses other things, such as storm movement, storm speed, etc.  So... a velocity scan on a radar generally shows how fast a storm is moving, and in which direction it is moving!  The picture on the left is an example of this.

Green represents storm-motion in one direction, and red represents the opposite direction.  (Technically the directions are "toward" and "away from" the radar's location.)  Generally a storm may have a little bit of both colors in it, since storms have the tendency to rotate slightly and movement isn't always uniform.  When either color is at it's brightest, that means that winds are very strong. in that direction.  And when both colors are strong, AND close together... that indicates strong rotation, swirling, and thus a potential funnel cloud or tornado.

Even though normal people would take cover during a tornado warning, my friends and I stood at the front of store to watch its progress.  First it started to rain... then HARD.  The winds started picking up… and then there was hail.   A woman who had been sitting at the bus stop in front of the store got up from her seat and bolted for the door, banging to get in.  She was shielding her five year old son from the hail.

We all continued to watch the storm progress, but thankfully the nickel-sized hail and powerful winds were the worst we ever saw of the storm.  Quite an exciting end to our storm chase trip… a storm that we don’t chase, but rather a storm that chased us!

 Our final stay for the trip will be in Rockford, Illinois, which is just south of the Wisconsin/Illinois border.  We are all ready to go home... bickering starts easily between certain people, there's no comfortable position to sleep in the van anymore.  It's been fun... but it's time to go home.

Day 16: Operation DRIVE!

Day 16:  Operation DRIVE

We left the hotel just after 7:00am.  We didn’t even have a morning meeting, we just got up and drove.  Storms were supposed to fire in eastern North Dakota early evening, and we had a long drive in order to reach out destination. 

It’s nice that we at least had an opportunity to see storms.  On Sunday we thought that we wouldn’t get to chase anything due to the Death-Ridge weather pattern, so we were glad that the pattern wasn’t as strong as we thought.  In fact, the risk for severe weather has been shifting slightly eastward with each day this week.  Yesterday we chased in Montana, today we would chase in North Dakota, and tomorrow we plan to chase in either Iowa or Wisconsin.  So it’s convenient that we can head east towards home while still continuing to chase.

Badlands of North Dakota.

The drive was long.  Honestly, I’m tired of being in the car.  Sleeping has become especially difficult because I can’t find a comfortable position anymore…  my back has gotten tired from sitting the same 5 ways I can sit in the car, so I can never fall asleep.  However, even dozing still passes the time.  I gave up on my knitting (go figure), and my ears can’t handle my marshmallow-earbuds for more than a few hours before they get sore.

We ate lunch in a little diner west of Bismarck, North Dakota.  Not gonna lie… it was cute, with its little retro style and vintage coke-machines.  However, I felt extremely disappointed when I ordered nachos and the waitress gave me a place with taco chips, beef, and all the toppings that looked EXACTLY like what I could have made at home for less than $2.  And I paid over $7 for that meal.  Not even quality ingredients…I was not impressed.

When we were west of Bismarck we stopped at a little gas station for a break, and we looked at the sky and noticed a storm forming just to our south.  We hung out there for a little while looking at the radar, and then decided to head south to chase it.

The storm continued to strengthen as we got close to it.  We were driving south and the storm was headed straight our way… we were trying to get to the south of it before it passed over top of us.  A little bit of rain wouldn’t bother us… it’s the hail-core and straight-line winds that we were worried about.  Our radar only refreshes every 6-7 minutes because that’s how long it takes for the Doppler to take several scans of the sky, and with every refresh the storm had picked up speed.  When I looked at the last scan that had the storm pretty much right-next to the road we were driving on, I knew we were in trouble.

First came the rain.  It was light at first, and we knew we had to keep moving in order to reach safety.  But then it started pounding, and we were in almost white-out conditions.  Over the radio we heard our leading van saying “We gotta pull over!  We gotta stop.”  So we pulled over onto the side of the road, flashers on, and hoped for the best.

Though I didn’t show it so much on the outside, I was actually freaking out.  I’ve never core-punched a storm before… we’ve always been trained to avoid the center core of a storm, since that’s where the hail and strong winds are.  If the hail is too big, our windows can smash through.  If the winds are too strong, our van can get tipped over.  And there we were… on the side of the road with nothing to do but take the blunt of the storm.  The winds were blowing perpendicular to the side of our van… and the hail was pounding on top of us.  Thankfully, the hail was only pea-sized.  And the winds couldn’t have been that strong… we survived without tipping.  The storm thankfully wasn’t strong enough to do us any major damage.

After that we had to take a loop…. Drive south,  then east, then back north to try and catch the storm again.  Unfortunately the storm was moving faster than we could get there… and by then the storm was weak enough that we decided it would be better to just move on and grab dinner.

I think by this point we were starting to get lazy with our storm chasing.  The storms that were popping up that day weren't that great, and so the natural instinct of the group was to give up if it didn't look like a tornado was going to appear.  I guess a lot of people just wanted to head eastward toward home.  Personally I was frustrated... as we continued to drive east another storm back behind us started to pop up.  I was the person monitoring the radar in the non-leading van, which was nice because for once I actually felt what I was doing, what I needed to look for.  A nice little storm popped up east of Bismarck, and I was waiting for us to turn around and chase it.  I even asked the chase leaders in the other van "What about this storm back behind us, are you looking at that?"  The response "Yeah, it sucks" really bothered me.  Even though all the elements needed for strong storms weren't there, it would still be nice to take a look at that storm's structure and whatnot.  However, that was the chase leader's decision and not ours.  While we ate dinner the storm became tornado-warned, so I guess we really lost out on that one.  I'm not sure if a tornado ever touched the ground or not, but it still would have been cool to see a funnel.

After dinner we saw a rainbow from a storm that had passed over us while we were eating.  The double-rainbow was pretty sweet.

We spent the night Fargo, Minnesota.  The plan is to drive southeast toward Wisconsin/Iowa.  If storms fire along the way, that's great.  The main point is to get home.

Day 15: Destination Montana!

When we woke up in Casper, our destination was Montana!  We saw conditions would be favorable for supercells and tornados in south-eastern Montana, so we continued onward!

The scenery we saw while driving up there was absolutely gorgeous!  Rolling, green hills with bright blue skies, western horizon lined with snow-topped mountains.   It was frustrating trying to take a picture of the hills/mountains, because no picture can capture how vast and wide the landscape was…  oh, it was so beautiful.  I almost wanted to live there in Wyoming/Montana, but with such a great distance between any sort of town we knew the area was isolated.  It was still pretty to watch as we drove by.

We arrived in Billings in early afternoon, and stopped at a park to sit around and wait for storms to fire up.  The girls went straight for the playground, particularly the swings.  The guys all started throwing Frisbees and hacky-sacks.  We were all bored within an hour, and we all sat on the picnic tables in the shade.

Storm initiation time was supposed to be later in the evening, and we were bored, so we decided to go grab some dinner.  We sat in the Wendy’s parking lot for another hour after grabbing food, and we watched a cloud anvil grow overhead.  I don’t quite remember why we sat there for so long… the storm was 40 miles away, and looked unimpressive.  Eventually though we decided to roll towards that storm, heading west out of Billings and turning north out of a little town called Laurel.  We were approaching the storm, which eventually had a Severe Thunderstorm Warning on it.

Mammatus clouds in the anvil of the storm as we approached it.  We could see it from nearly 40 miles away! 

The major problem with chasing in Montana is that there just aren’t many roads.   In some places we could go for tens of miles before finding a crossroad to turn off on.  Thankfully the route that we took had a decent-enough place.  We did, however, have to turn off of the road and onto a gravel road in order to chase this particular storm.

Keeping a visual on the storm was difficult with all the hills – thankfully our gravel road took us to a plateau where we could see the storm come towards us easily.  There was a hill in front of us that kept us from fully seeing the storm, but the storm was going to move pretty close to us so we would be able to see the structure of it, from a mostly-safe distance, after it moved over the hill.

The structure for this storm was beautiful.  We could see the rotation of the storm, the inflow, the mammatus clouds – all indicators of a healthy storm.  Eventually we saw indicators of rotation on the radar, and knew that something could happen.

Look at how beautiful this storm is!  See how those clouds are twisting , being drawn toward the center of the storm?!

The problem is that the storm eventually became tornado-warned… but we couldn’t find the tornado!  We looked, saw areas of rotation, but didn’t’ really see a funnel or the things we were looking for.  Eventually, though, we saw something in the rain-shaft… a while vertical line that looked kind of strange.  The tornado was rain-wrapped!  Oh, that is so dangerous… horrifying to watch, because the little town that storm was passing over wouldn’t even be able to see that tornado until it was right on top of them thanks to all that rain.   

Within this band of rain was a tornado!  Occasionally we could see a white vertical line appear that was most likely the rotating tornado!

It was so beautiful to watch though.  We eventually we had to head east because we were planning to chase in eastern North Dakota the next day.  The problem was finding a hotel close to us – there was concert in the Billings area, and thus all the hotels that were available for a decent price were booked.  We ended up with a Hampton Inn in Billings, even though we had wanted to go further east, because otherwise we’d have to drive 2.5-3 hours and it was already 10:00pm.  

Day 14: The Beauty of the Rockies.

Woke up very groggily this morning in Denver, Colorado.  Wasn’t sure what to expect this morning… the hotel had already deceived us by claiming to have a quality breakfast and then didn’t offer half the things they had boldly advertised.  Example: Posters about fresh-made cinnamon buns in several places.  There were none.   That wasn’t cool with me… but anyway, after that we had our morning meeting.

It’s Sunday and the original plan for our trip is to arrive home in Muncie on Thursday, with some flexibility depending on our budget.  The problem is what the weather patterns are setting up for what we call a “Death Ridge” – a pattern that promotes fair weather and unfavorable conditions for storms.  That ridge looks like it will be hanging around for the next week, making our last chase week to seem rather boring.

Conditions for eastern Montana on Monday still looked somewhat favorable.  We took a vote and decided that we would chase in Montana the next day and then start heading home after that – from where we are now in the country it’s at least a 2-day drive back to Indiana.

However, since we are in Denver now, and we planned to split up the drive to Montana between today and tomorrow, we decided to take advantage of the fact we were near the rockies.  So for today we went to the Rocky Mountain National Park! (Another idea brought up was to visit the Coors brewery, but our professor pretended he didn’t hear that idea.)

For lunch we went to Estes Park in Boulder, CO.  Such a rich place full of culture!  Our assistant professor’s wife lived in Colorado while they were dating, so he knew it would be a great area to stop for lunch.   We found quite a rich culture!  The places was an outdoor pedestrian area, several blocks long,  lined with little boutiques.  Instead of a street between the shops there was a brick sidewalk with tall shade trees, flowers, benches.  But it wasn’t just an outdoor mall… nearly all the businesses were local, gourmet, specialty… and everywhere we walked we heard the sound of some local musician serenading us with his talent.  There were also street performers who did juggled, walked on stilts or performed stunts.  As charmed as I was with the whole place, my main goal was to find a meal that wouldn’t be overpriced (food was expensive) and would satisfy my only somewhat-hungry stomach.  I ended up with a frozen-yogurt strawberry-banana smoothie.  It hit the spot!

After that we headed for the park.  I have never been far enough west to see the Rockie Mountains, so I gazed in awe as the mountains in the distance started getting closer and closer in the window.  Before I knew it we were driving up in the hills, and eventually into the park.  The only mountains I’ve ever seen are the Appalachian Mountains, and the Rockies weren’t like them at all!!

I felt like I was living in a place too good to be true.  Oh, it was so beautiful!  The pine trees, the large rocks, the streams of water flowing down… I normally am not a fan of pine trees, but these were gorgeous.  Oh, I fell in love…  We drove our van through the park and the first thing we saw was a herd of reindeer!  They were HUGE animals!

We parked our vans and started climbing a nature trail.  Our goal was to reach a lake that would give us a great view of the mountains.  On the first part of the trail we saw a herd of caribou too.

My storm chase team!  

View from the bottom of the mountain.

I don’t think I fully understood what I was getting into when I started down that trail. At the beginning of the trail there were just nice dirt paths, with an occasional weathered rock beneath our feet.  However, it started to get more difficult.  About ¾ of a mile in we started walking across uneven rocks, being careful not to slip in my tennis shoes as we stepped between small ground rocks that jutted up over a foot high.  ¾ of the way through the journey to the mountain we actually had to walk UP a creek… a steep creek with flat, slippery rocks… and then after that on unstable bed of rocks to continue up the path.  The path got steeper, more jagged, and the air was thinner with left my heart pounding like a metronome as we stumbled to the top.

I’m not going to lie, that view at the top was worth it. We ended up at a lake where we could just sit and look out at the mountain.  It was gorgeous, so far away from urbanization and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in my life.  

This picture doesn't do near enough justice to how gorgeous this view was.  We could see the top of that mountain in the back, and there were blue skies so bright that the picture just whited it out.  It was absolutely breathtaking though.

Overwhelmed with the beauty, I wanted to cry, and my heart knew that I needed to move out west whenever I had the opportunity.

While I knew that the lake was 2.3 miles away from our starting point, I had assumed that would be a circular path and got confused, thinking that included the way back to the van.  NO.  We walked 2.3 miles just to get TO the lake… I was informed that we had to walk back DOWN the same trail we just walked up.  Oh, I wanted to die…. My body isn’t used to hiking.  In fact, I’ve been sitting in a van for 6+ hours every day, so my body isn’t used to MOVING in general.

Couple of my classmates trying to wade around the flowing stream.

Thankfully the hike down was much quicker on the way up.  I didn’t stop to take pictures, didn’t stop… I was achy, tired, hungry, and on a mission to stop the pain as soon as I possibly could.  About 30-45 minutes later we were at the bottom of the trail, in the van, and on the road again.

While I was on the mountain I saw two birds I’ve never seen before:  the Stellers Jay and the Magpie.  Both birds are native to the Rockies and westward.

Magpie

Stellar's Jay

As I write this I am sitting in the van on the way to Casper, Wyoming.  We are staying at the Hampton Inn tonight, which will be so nice after staying in Motel 8’s.  Tomorrow we will wake up early and head for Montana.  We were actually ahead of the Storm Prediction Center with their forecasting… later this afternoon they too had saw that eastern Montana would be a good place for storms for tomorrow.

 

We shouldn’t have a problem with whether or not these storms fire, like we’ve had the past few days.  Storms definitely will spring up… the issue will be whether or not there are so many that they form an unchasable squall-line.  I guess we’ll just have to see how things go!

Day 13: I’m so sick of driving.

Our morning started out in Rapid City, South Dakota.  The alarm went off way too early, it seemed, but we had to get an early start in order to get everything accomplished.  Half of our group wanted to see Mt. Rushmore, so we made a quick trip to the monument before heading toward our target area for the day.

My mother has always talked about wanting to visit Mt. Rushmore, so I felt so blessed to be able to go see it myself.  (Mom, I still hope you get to see it too!!)  I’ll admit, the monument Is only exciting for about 30 minutes, if that.  We got there, took a few pictures, and then felt kind of bored.  However, the day we went was perfect!  Not a cloud in the sky, so beautiful!  We had heard the day before that it was best to take pictures in the morning because of how the shadows fell… Oh, it was perfect.  Beautiful.

After that we had a long drive to Eastern Colorado.  We had a small chance that storms may fire in that area… because of the topography of the area, coming off of the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, there is normally enough wind-spin that can help produce storms and tornados.   In fact, Weld County, Colorado experiences more tornados per square mile than any other place in the world because the landscape and conditions often promote very favorable conditions for tornados.

Passed a truck that had my last name on the back.  I was pretty excited...

And so we drove.  For.  A.  Long.  Time.  And the roads weren’t always in the best shape either.  I don’t know if the ground had sunk over the years or what, but there were stretches of road that felt like we were driving over ski moguls: back and forth, so lumpy, uneven.  I had taken motion sickness medicine (as I have done almost every day on this trip) and I had my eyes on the road and I STILL gained a nauseating headache while on those roads.  Plus, we were all so sore from riding for so long the day before… I was turning into a grumpy bitch even though I was trying so hard not to.  I felt so much better for the switch-up that happened when my professor asked me to drive the van for a while.  I mean, we were still on the road, but at least I had something to do!  All these hours on the road can make a person go insane.  

Long story short, the storms fired up but died with 20 minutes of their formation.  Something was missing that kept them from developing into a strong supercell.  It only took about an hour’s time for us to realize that all our chasing would be at a loss for the night.  So instead we booked a hotel about 20 miles out of Denver.

Before the hotel, though we stopped at a nice Indian Restaurant.  I’ve never had Indian food before – to be honest I was terrified by it because I’ve heard it’s spicy.  My stomach generally doesn’t do well with spices and heat, so I was nervous.  However, I ordered eggplant cooked with onions, tomatoes, and peas.  And I’ll be honest… it was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Not sure what this next week will hold for us.  Weather patterns aren’t looking great – most of the country may end up seeing sunny skies with little rain, so we may end up driving home early.  It all depends on what we decide for tomorrow.

Day 12: Destination Rapid City!

My morning in Mobridge, South Dakota consisted of the snooze button, conversation about the night before, and a hearty Burger King breakfast.  I didn’t get much sleep the night before because some of my roommates had knocked on my door in the middle of the night trying to make me angry.  They stayed around the hotel bar a while longer than I had, so they were a little bit rowdy.  Additionally, there was an overwhelming stench of pot in the hotel… the smell just billowed into my room.  No worries, none of our group members smoke pot… but someone sure was!  Just another event to add to the excitement of the evening.

Anyway, we left our hotel for a leisurely drive to the western part of the state.  There wouldn’t be any weather for us to chase today, so we traveled to be in a better position tomorrow in case things fired up along the Western Plains. We hit Rapid City around mid-afternoon.   I’ve never been to the Black Hills, and I’ll admit the terrain change was nice.  After being in rolling plains for the past two weeks, we entered an area filled with steep hills and pine trees.

We saw some fire damage as we got into the area.

I’ve always heard about forest fires on the news, but I never actually paid attention.  So seeing areas of cleared trees really took me by surprise: I didn’t know what had happened!  Plus, I have no idea how long it takes for areas like this to rejuvenate… The fire could have been from a few years ago, for all I know!

Since we had time, we visited Jewel Cave National Monument.  I had never heard of it before, but apparently it’s the 2^nd longest cave in the world.  The longest is Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

Teri, Me, Lindsey.

I had gone spelunking when I was in 6^th grade, so I knew that caves can really play upon my claustrophobia.  Thankfully this was a walking tour, filled with concrete walkways and metal staircases, so it wasn’t so bad.

There were also dim lights throughout the cave, so we didn’t have to bring a flashlight or anything.  At one point our guide turned down all the lights and we experienced pitch black in the cave – something I don’t think I’ve ever fully experienced before.  Pitch black, underground, silence.  My eyes couldn’t comprehend it… I kept seeing light-shadows like my brain was trying to pick up on something that wasn’t there. 

The cave was gorgeous, though I gave up trying to take pictures because my camera doesn’t give justice to the beauty of those dark caves.  I did get a couple of good pictures though.

These rocks kind of remind me of mammatus clouds...

I wish I could somehow capture depth in this picture... it was so beautiful!

That hike was pretty exhausting though.  The guide said we had walked 750 steps just on stairwells alone… the walk was about  ½ a mile.

After the cave we had dinner at an awesome local steakhouse called the Dark Horse.  I had my first buffalo burger there… and some nice happy hour beers.  Such a perfect meal after a long hike up and down that cave.  We stopped at a go-cart place and had some fun there.  It was a nice evening not being in the car for obnoxious periods of time.

Tomorrow we might be chasing in Montana.  Guess we’ll have to see what our chase leaders say in the morning.

Days 9, 10, 11: Rest, Fatigue, Exhaustion

It's been a few days since I've written since I've been absolutely exhausted.  On Day 9 I crashed pretty much as soon as I got to the hotel, and yesterday we were in the car for over 12 hours.

Day 9: We had a down day in Lincoln, Nebraska.  All the risk for severe storms was over in the Midwest (Michigan, to be exact) and so we had no reason to pack up and leave our hotel.  It was nice to rest... we went to a laundry mad hat, saw Hangover 2 (which kind of horrified me) and had a few drinks at a local sports bar.  Not too shabby...

Day 10: Our risk for storms was set to be in Western Nebraska, so we traveled due west to set up.  As the day went on we started to see more clouds like these:

When expecting storm development we watch for towering cumulus clouds like these., which indicate rising air.

We knew that storms would be firing soon... and eventually we saw on radar a storm that was quickly growing into something we could chase.

A few miles outside of Lexington, NE, we got our first view of a storm for the day.  We even saw a wall-cloud form, which means the storm was healthily rotating at the center.  Later on we even saw a funnel spout down... but it only lasted for a few seconds before going up into the cloud.

The storm actually lasted a pretty long time... and it was easy to chase too.  It pretty much stayed within the same 20 mile radius for several hours before it finally died.  At one point we let the storm pass us while we grabbed dinner (it looked like it was starting to die, but then later it rejuvenated) and we headed straight back into the rain of the storm.  On the way end we got to see a rainbow!

This storm ended up dying without producing anything more than small hail.  But it was still fun to chase.  We stayed in northern Nebraska with the intent of driving up north to the Dakotas the next day.

At least we got a pretty sunset!

Day 11:  This day was a pain.  We had to get up super early because it would be a 7+ hour drive to make it to South Dakota before storms fired.  Not much to say about the drive... it was long, tiring, and made me stiff from sitting in the same place  The terrain in South Dakota is much flatter, and I'm pretty sure the water table is in general a lot higher than in places like Indiana - there were a lot of places that had standing water.


And I'm sure the area is somewhat used to flooding because I saw quite a few yellow-headed black birds.  I'm guessing for these birds to be around there has to be enough marshy-areas to support them.

Yellow-Headed Black Bird - lives in marshy areas in the central to western parts of the United States.  So cute!!

Storms started to fire late afternoon, and we were in good position to see them even though we had to travel quite a ways to get to them.  From far back we could see the storms building - oh, they were enormous and beautiful!  The anvil of the cloud went on forever!  It was cool to watch them just rise from afar - because the land was so flat we could see the storms from miles away.

The storm was beautiful for looking at - but as far as structure is concerned from a strength-perspective, it was terrible.  There wasn't much wind-shear to cause rotation within the storms, and actually they ended up dying out within about an hour.  We positioned ourselves in a couple of good places though to get some good pictures.

We eventually just let the storm pass over us, though by that point it was just an empty cloud-base.

View of the clouds, straight up, as we were driving towards finding a hotel.

After that we decided to start looking for a place to stay for the evening.  The problem was that there weren't that many hotels available in the middle of South Dakota.  We were actually chasing on an Indian Reservation at the time, and all the local casinos were booked.  There was a lot of conflict, drama, grouchiness as we all bickered about where to go - should we drive another 2 hours down to Nebraska?  Should we go up to the next biggest city in North Dakota, even though we'd have to backtrack and go south the next day?  We eventually found a hotel in a nearby town called Mobridge.  We had trouble booking the hotel at first - the phone lines were busy.  However, we found out why a little later...

As we pulled up to the hotel, we saw another car caravan pull into the parking lot.  A very distinct looking vehicle pulled in, and we all got excited!!  IT WAS THE TIV!!  For those of you who don't know, the T.I.V. (Tornado Intercept Vehicle) is a specially designed armored car built for driving into the path of a tornado by Sean Casey, a famous storm chaser.  And all those other cars with him were filmmakers for the discovery Channel's show Storm Chasers!!  It was pretty exciting.