Getting a bit bored with the hum drum day to day stuff of trying to design better audio circuits, I took a couple of days off last week and went on a tornado chase tour.
It was an "on call" tour run by Silver Lining Tours, with Roger Hill in charge, one of the noted specialists in that field. Normal tornado chase tours are booked as much as a year in advance, and you take your chances as to what the weather will be like when your tour date comes up. An "on call" tour is a last minute thing. They let you know if the conditions in the next couple of days look ripe, and you then just drop everything and head for the meeting point (normally Denver).
I had been thinking about this for several years now, and when I got the word from Roger, I figured I was not getting any younger and did drop everything and headed west.
I left Woodbury, MN at 2:00 am and drove 610 miles on Thursday to meet up with the tour in Salina, Kansas. This saved a few hundred driving miles as I did not have to get all the way to the starting point in Denver. They picked me up at noon (I averaged 71 miles per hour for the drive there). We headed southeast to pick up two more tornado junkies at the Witicha airport. We then drove another hundred miles southeast to meet up with Roger Hill's scheduled tour already at the jumping off point into the approaching series of supercells.
A few minutes of study of the radar, the maps, the GPS, and telephone reports from various spotters and we were speeding along country roads from Dogpatch and stopped at a lonely hilltop just in time for a grumbling green supercell wall cloud to first form the bottom of a big dishpan almost on top of us, send a little spike downward, then zip down a little wiggly little snake, and then expand into an awesome "elephant trunk" of a real live tornado about 1000 feet from us. We neatly sidestepped it and started to follow, but it got wrapped in rail so we paused to find better pickings. One rule of tornado chasing is not to chase a tornado you can't see. Good rule. Another was that when the baseball size hail starts, move to the center of the van and cover up with the conveniently provided blankets.
Thirty minutes of zinging along winding and wet country roads brought us in front on the next supercell in this amazing line of violent weather that lasted three days and is still going strong near the east cost of the USA as I write this.
This storm also performed on schedule, and a much wider and more intense tornado came spinning down about a half mile to our southwest, moving northeast! No time to sit and stare, another rule explained to us in advance was that when they shout, we have to go NOW its dive into the van and sort out the seating space and whether you are laying on your face or on your butt later. This tornado also vanished into a wall of water as we did a right angle jog away from its path.
By now the adrenaline was kinda off the charts. Two tornadoes in half an hour seemed like kind of a nice start for this adventure, like seeing the grand climax of an amazing shootem-up movie before even finding you theater seats. When you consider than many tornado tours see nothing more than some nice rainbows and a bit of pretty clouds and pea size hail in their week on the road, we certainly were getting our money's worth.
Next we bounced down the huge line of forming and expanding supercell all the way into Oklahoma and past Tulsa. We saw the huge violent storm that caused casualties down there but were slowed down with evening traffic around Tulsa in the gathering darkness and deluges of rain. The death dealing tornado was in there lurking, but surrounded by a wall of rain we dared not enter.
We ended up the evening south of Tulsa where darkness and logistics made us quit. The main one week tour was headed east towards Fort Smith, Arkansas and more tornadoes on the way, but the other two chasers on our special on call tour both had 6 am plane flights to catch out of Witicha and we were not going to get back up to there before 11 pm at the best. So we caught our breath and turned around and headed back to Witicha and a bit of very late dinner before dropping them off at the airport hotel. Then it was another 1-2 hour drive back to Salina and my motel room. I tried to doze in the van for the remainer of the trip, but the lightning flashes were still to frequent and bright and noisy.
I got back to the motel at 1:30 am, after 500 miles in the tour van, and that was after the 600 mile drive down there. It was a bit past my bed time nearly 24 hours after starting this odyssey. I slept like a rock and work up at 9 am on Friday and then all I had to do to relax was get in the car and drive the 610 miles home through torrents of rain and 50 mph wind gusts all the way. I made it home at 7 pm last night and actually am well recovered today. This 72 year old guy still likes a nice drive in the country in my Audi S6.
So, I would suggest that a tornado chase tour is one thing I would definitely recommend you add to your bucket list. Actually I am already to do it again.
Regards,
Frank Van Alstine
