Date: June 3, 2018
Time: 4:00 - 7:00 PM MDT
Place: Corona, Carrizozo, NM
Distance: 1088 mi (791 positioning, 128 chasing, 169 to home)
Camera: T3i, GoPro 7, RX100ii
Warnings: SVR
Rating: S3

Pre-Chase

June 3, 12:00 PM - 11:20 PM MDT: Yesterday was a travel day from Grand Island to Denver, which usually wouldn't garner a mention. But little did we realize what a special surprise was in store. Late that afternoon as we checked into our hotel -- the Marriott Denver Tech Center (a little fancy, but we got a great price) -- we noticed that the other hotel guests had an unusually ... muscular ... look. Low and behold, upon exploring the hotel we realized we were at ground zero for the 2018 Internation Fitness and Body Building Mile High Showdown!!!! This was truly a one-of-a-kind conference -- very different from the more mathematical ones I'm used to. Meeting rooms covered in plastic were available for spray tanning; weird energy drinks and strange body building food pouches were available for swag. It was truly a magical and unexpected afternoon, and we felt absolutely no awkwardness brushing elbows with bikini and speedo-clad body builders.

Later, after a great meal and beer flight at Yard House, we went to bed with expectations of a nice lazy day shopping and sight-seeing around Denver. I was hardly tracking the setup developing right in our own back yard...

11:00 AM - 4:00 PM CDT: No matter what outlooks suggest the night before, I'm always gonna wake up and check models first thing. And what started as a marginal outlook yesterday was upgraded to a slight but "all severe types possible" forecast right over central New Mexico -- with decent looking storm evolution on CAMs. Thus, full of FOMO, and much to Toni's chagrin (no Ikea this trip), we piled in the Crosstrek and started the long I25 drive south. Agonizingly, by lunch time I watched great looking discrete supercells slowly develop west of ABQ while we were still hours out. But by 4pm, it was time to chart an intercept route as storms crested the Sandias.

The Chase

4:00 - 4:50 PM MDT: As a shortcut, I took Hwy3 south off I25 through the Pecos River valley to Villanueva -- actually a beautiful new drive that I should've enjoyed more if not for the rush. A couple semi-discrete supercells were just entering the plains east of the Sandias, and this shortcut put us downstream of the northern cell. We posted up for the first timelapse of the day north of Encino -- beautiful mammatus overhead and a darker shelf cloud on the horizon over the wind turbines. But the more I monitored radar trends, the more I was convinced to get on the next storm further south.

4:50 - 5:50 PM MDT: Sure enough, almost as soon as we packed up and started south on Hwy285, a Tornado Warning was issued on the southern supercell. After a classic train-blocking-the-chase moment in Encino, we were on our way towards the only logical intercept spot of Corona. Unfortunately, New Mexico is a road no-mans-land in the triangle between Willard, Mountainair, and Corona -- right where the storm was tracking.

Interestingly, Corona sits atop a beautiful mesa outcropping and created a wonderful view as we headed southwest for the intercept. By this point, the TOR warning had already been dropped as the storm was definitely becoming outflow dominant, but I was still determined to get some nice shots of the intensifying shelf cloud entering town. Always a sucker for a weird foreground, I set up timelapse in the middle of town next to an old Union Pacific rail inspection cart -- an odd yellow piece of infrastructure providing a nice juxtaposition to the blue-green shelf rolling in from the west. Crackling lightning and creosote smell made for a wonderful intercept, but by 5:50 it was time to duck south to avoid the hail.

5:50 - 9:50 PM MDT: As we continued SSW on Hwy54 out of Corona, new bases quickly merged into a growing shelf -- storms were growing upscale into an MCS right on top of us. Gustnadoes whirled up in the outflow all around -- a chaotic mess of competing updrafts as storms congealed. We stopped a couple more times north and east of Carrizozo as the cells moved over the Sacramento Mountains onwards towards Roswell.

By 7:10, it was finally time to call the chase and head home -- a relatively quick jaunt west on Hwy380 then north on I25 (a rather weird and unique path home from a storm chase). Along the way, we stopped just a few miles north of the Trinity Site to admire the sunset mammatus of the departing MCS. The distant thunderstorm towers back-shearing in the fading evening light created an eerie echo to the isolated mushroom cloud updraft that grew here on that stormy morning 78 years prior.

Recap, Filmmaking Notes, and Lessons Learned