On May 21, Alethea Kontis and I met up with chaser friends in Limon, Colorado, including Jason Persoff, Bill Hark and Jack Beven. This is Jason’s backyard, and he was optimistic that we’d get some “Colorado magic” while sharing his knowledge of the ways of the DCVZ. That’s the Denver Convergence Voriticity Zone that enhances the potential for severe weather in eastern Colorado.
Promising convection northwest of Limon yielded a distant landspout tornado. The storm became severe-warned, and we were off, heading north and then chasing this beast east. Or, at times, being chased.
Southeast of Last Chance we watched the beautiful storm. (Multi-image panorama)
We spent a lot of the day southeast of the aptly named Last Chance, on beautiful, remote farm roads. I think it was Jason who said he didn’t expect to see many chasers out here.
Friends, we saw hundreds of chasers. This is the new way, unfortunately. I know we’re chasers, too. I just wish there weren’t so many of us.
Crowds not only complicate tornado targeting and egress — they make it difficult to escape a hail core when it’s moving over a dirt road with no outlets.
We got into the fringe of this beast’s core and mostly suffered small but unnervingly loud hail as I cursed. A lot. (Edited out of the video.) I was not in the mood to have my car destroyed again, and fortunately, we were able to turn south and get out of the way. Other chasers were not so lucky and experienced extreme damage to windows and car bodies.
Interesting lowerings suggested rotation.
Meanwhile, the storm was rotating and became tornado-warned. We were with it the whole time, but with the hail and road challenges, we didn’t see a tornado. “Brief” tornadoes were reported. Eh, it wasn’t worth losing windows!
Maybe we didn’t have all the Colorado magic this day, but it was a fun and exciting chase and especially enjoyable with friends.
Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.
And here’s our update the next day when we talked about the chase.
Back in 2001, when I’d been chasing storms for just a few years, Dave Lewison and I met up with Scott Blair and Jason Politte on May 30 and headed into northeast New Mexico in pursuit of supercells. We found one that formed on the high plains. There were cold temperatures aloft and the perfect ingredients for rock-hard hail. We knew the storm was producing this hail – we could see it, falling from the cloud like a white waterfall – and we were determined to get ahead of it. 
Even now, chasers get caught by hail. Hell, some chasers rush into it. But back in the days of no in-car radar data, when we’d “go visual” to figure out where to be in relation to the storm, it was even easier to screw up. And boy, did we screw up. We got on I-40 and were caught by the storm just inside the Texas Panhandle, with no exits or shelter in sight. Our cars were bombed by sideways-blowing hail for about ten minutes, including stones up to baseball size. To this day, I avoid chasing storms on Interstates because of this experience. See more pictures and a thorough account of this chase in the 
May 6: Colby, Kansas
On our way to the border, we stopped in Shattuck, Okla., where a mesmerizing park sprouts a number of old-time windmills, in a variety of designs. Every time the wind blows, there’s a haunting creaking and whispering from these beautiful mechanical trees, giant metal flowers that tower above the colorful wildflowers at their feet.
e were feeling cold outflow winds the whole time, and then, briefly, we got warm inflow, the sign that at least one part of the storm was still trying to stay alive by pulling in warm air from the east. About that time, a huge gustnado – could it have been a tornado? – spun up red dust in the field right next to us. The dust churned and rose, almost in a tube shape, to the edge of the storm clouds.
I last wrote on May 15. On May 16, we chased with George in Kansas, but didn’t see much … just some mushy storms and a few lightning bolts. And my car’s odometer turned over 100,000 miles somewhere near Liberal, Kansas.
After a brief lightning show at our hotel in Denison, Texas, we got a little sleep and got psyched for Sunday, May 20. The Storm Prediction Center’s discussions of the day’s potential included all kinds of signs of doom, and the other data seemed to bear out the potential for tornadoes. We hovered on the Texas-Oklahoma border at a truck stop, checking data on the laptop, then headed into Oklahoma to Atoka in the early afternoon to get nearer to where the action was, in the PDS tornado watch box – or “particularly dangerous situation.” A quick Internet radar check revealed a couple of storms had already gone up north of us, on the boundary. We started heading that way.
Ahead of us on Route 75 were two Doppler on Wheels trucks. We took this as a good sign, but the circumstances were not good. Chasing in eastern Oklahoma is challenging, to say the least. There are massive hills and lots of trees. It’s very difficult to see storm structure. And rain makes it even worse, and boy, did we get rain – but not yet.
Certainly, we were in a tornadic circulation, if not just south of a tornado, and my adrenaline was high. It’s the first time I ever felt truly in danger from a storm. In town, the sirens were screaming. Some guy was poking along ahead of me as if he was out shopping for flowers. I flashed my lights and he moved over. At a red light, I stopped, made sure no cars were coming, then went through with my blinkers on. Dave was aghast. I said, “It’s a #&%*$ tornado, Dave, I’m running the red light!” As we pushed through town, rain curtains ahead of us were clearly rushing from right to left, wrapping around the area of rotation. We were in the “bear’s cage,” no doubt about it.
May 27 was a blast, or, you might say, a sandblast. Dave, Bill and I met up with Steve Sponsler and headed up into Kansas. We had hopes for supercells, but most storms were going up early and beginning to merge in a messy line. At a truck stop in Sublette, we looked at radar images and weighed our options as the sky outside became more and more ominous. By the time we headed north, it was too late to get individual cells … the whole mess had merged into a great line, a dramatic shelf cloud rolling toward us, kicking up brown dirt underneath it as it went. We stopped by a radar dome and got video and stills as it approached. Then the first dust hit. It was a haboob, a Dust Bowl storm, a roaring animal.
Upslope storms – the kind that form on the higher elevations near the mountains – seemed the best bet for May 28. The phones were out in the hotel, which was a very plush Super 8, I might add, so we got the basics on the day’s outlook from Jay Antle and began meandering west. We met up with Ed Roberts from Kansas City and some other chasers in Guymon, Oklahoma, who kindly shared some data files they’d pulled, and we headed farther west. In Dalhart, Texas, a nice woman at the Holiday Inn Express let us plug in for a few minutes to get more information, and we headed for Clayton, New Mexico. If you’re counting, that’s three states already.
