Date: June 24, 2018
Time: 4:30 - 7:50 PM MDT
Place: Lamar, Springfield, CO
Distance: 584 mi (191 positioning, 14 chasing, 379 to home)
Camera: T3i, GoPros5 & 7, Karma, RX100ii
Warnings: None
Rating: S2

Pre-Chase

12:00 PM CDT- 5:00 PM MDT: Alas, what a classic microcosm of the 2018 storm chase season. Yesterday we had a tasty SPC day 2 medium risk over the heart of chasing nirvana: southwest Kansas. But last night's MCS overperformed -- scouring the whole region from NE New Mexico to the SE corner of Oklahoma. Will there be time for airmass recovery? Maybe -- it is June after all. But this totally changes our strategy from a classic plains chase to another Colorado upslope day. Not exactly the evolution I was hoping for.

Still, just being out in the middle of nowhere on a quiet Sunday is itself a nice treat. Leaving Garden City after a lazy morning, we dropped south and then west though Ulysses and Johnson City -- cutting a path through one of my favorite parts of the plains. It's not quite high desert but also not quite lush prairie -- call it medium-high plains. A few miles from the KS/CO border, I found a deserted farmstead and spent most of an hour with my sliderail and drone filming the different structures.

By 2PM, storms were well underway further north along the Palmer divide, but I was banking on more discrete possibilities in SE Colorado, and so we held our ground between Springfield and Lamar. Still with plenty of time to kill, we stopped at the hilariously-named "Gobbler's Knob Rest Area" along Hwy 287 -- not much to write home about. Finally, by 4:15 we started to get initiation further south near La Junta and heading our way.

The Chase

4:30 - 6:00 PM MDT: South of Lamar, I found a nice pull-out complete with a windmill, abandoned out-building, a smooth green snake (that's its actual name), and a ton of gnats. Despite the company, I set up some drone and slider timelapse shots as the distant storms moved in from the northwest. The next hour was spent soaking in the sounds of passing semis, whooshing wind turbines, and mooing cows -- classic chasing ambiance, right? But given my earlier expectations for the day, the approaching non-descript dark bases didn't inspire the most epic of reactions.

Storms were in no hurry to mature as they approached Hwy 287, and even worse, they already started to congeal into a line. Definitely NOT the evolution I wanted to see. Without much of a coherent chase strategy, and as the 6PM hour neared, we drifted listlessly south.

6:00 - 6:50 PM MDT: At our next stop several miles south, I was surprised to see a much more robust and impressive shelf cloud had quickly matured while our backs were turned. Unbeknownst to me, a significant surge of outflow from the storms further north had just slammed into our cells and given them new life. To be fair, tornado potential was now zero, but I'd take a nice shelf cloud over the pitiful bases we'd just watched.

The next hour was spent hopping south just ahead of the surging outflow. The bowing shelf took on multiple shapes and stacked layers as it pursued us towards Springfield. There was just enough time to get some timelapse and drone shots as we let the sagging boundary creep up to us before hopping south again. At the ominously-named Ship Wreck Ranch, we let the chilly outflow overtake us.

6:50 - 9:15 PM MDT: 7PM is often when the chase really gets going as the low-level jet ramps up and maximizes tornado chances, but not today. As a final target, we dropped south to Boise City in front of a puny little "Raton Runner" storm, but it was so insignificant that we didn't even stop or take any photos. It was an inglorious end to a stingy chase.

Sunday evening in the plains is also the most barren of food deserts -- often you're lucky just to snag something from a gas station if they're even open. So we felt both fortunate and embarrassed to pull into the Boise City Darie Queen at 7:55 PM -- five minutes before closing (yes we felt terrible). After that, it was a long 4.5-hour drive back to ABQ. Along the way, our old friend the outflow boundary kicked off some fresh convection in NE New Mexico -- creating a nice twilight ambiance. We just clipped the edge of the storms as we passed through Clayton, but we didn't stop or get any lightning photos. As the season was winding down, so was I -- it's been a tough 2018 for chasing.

Recap, Filmmaking Notes, and Lessons Learned