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.