May 10, 2023

May 10 looked like the most robust setup of our Plains run this far with an upslope supercell play in the Denver area. We were initially torn on whether to go north to the Sterling area or play south by La Junta, but settled on a hedge target just east of the Denver metro.

“It’s 9:05!” Brindley called out as I chatted with a couple chasers before we departed our hotel in Hays, KS. We had a long drive west down 70 ahead of us and storms looked to fire by early afternoon as is often the case with these Denver upslope plays.

A crude annotation we made on the phone showing the day’s chase strategy. We were watching high based convection percolating off the foothills south of Denver. The plan was to catch cells initiating off of that as they tracked into the richer moisture and higher CAPE air to the northeast, east of the Denver airport.

We were getting low on gas, and then the fuel light came on. Distance to empty indicated we still had 40 miles of range. Reenacting Kramer in Seinfeld, I confidently reassured Brindley as she drove that you can drive these things way down below the line before they’re actually out of gas. She was not impressed. We had just a few more miles to go before our target's exit, anyway. “We’ll make it.” With a DTE of 35 miles, we crested a hill and the engine sputtered out. Brindley coasted the van off to the right-hand shoulder of I-70, and then glared at me. We stopped about 4 miles short of our exit. Luckily, we had been in communication with the team and knew Hank was still coming up 70 behind us. We sent the message out that we were stranded, and a few minutes later our rescue party arrived, including Daniel Shaw who was caravanning with Hank. Prepared for anything, Daniel dug the jerrycan out of the back of his chase vehicle and got us the couple gallons of gas needed to make it into Bennett.

I filled up Daniel’s gas tank in Bennett as a way of saying thank you for saving us, and we waited in the gas station lot for initiation along with a bunch of other chasers including local legends Tony Laubach and Ed Grubb.

A storm fired at our target, and we decided to move in for an immediate intercept.

Unfortunately, the north-northeast track of the cell kept it over the Denver suburban sprawl. We hoped the storm would turn right and move into the open plains to the east as it went supercellular, but it instead went tornado warned over heavily populated areas. We hunted for a view among traffic and traffic lights, and were greeted by a ground scraping high precipitation supercell with a menacingly dark inflow band and rear flank gust front.

We noted left to right motion in the huge base indicating broad rotation. Getting a photogenic tornado out of this beastly cell would be challenging, however.

The cell gusted out with icy cold outflow and the atmosphere around it started to overturn, storms erupting seemingly everywhere. We tried to bail north and east, but were swallowed as cells exploded overhead. We soon found ourselves in a line of chaser and local traffic and as hail started to accumulated in the road, making for slick conditions.

We escaped and retargeted new development firing off of 70, east of our original Bennett target. Cells were robust, with billowing high contrast convection and carved out mesocyclones.

Billowing tower:

Sculpted updraft:

Wave like rolls in cumulus, probably denoting strong wind shear:

We were running north to keep up with the inflow notch of the dominant cell, but then had to double back as there were tornado reports coming in from the south. We turned to see a landspout ongoing beneath the supercell’s flanking line updraft base.

We pulled off into an empty dirt plot and stopped to get some zoomed shots of the vortex, which was probably fairly weak, but technically a tornado.

A wide shot showing the circulation dissipating on the left, and the supercell’s rear flank gust front on the right:

We stair stepped north and east, but trailing behind an arc of cells we started to lose our contrast and were in and out of hail cores. We spotted another landspout to the northeast, this one looked a bit more robust, but was further away and lower contrast than our first catch.

We tried to keep up, but encountered treacherous hail drifts that finally gave way to blowing dust and tumbleweeds flying across the sandy, unpaved roads. Storms were erupting everywhere and turning into a rainy mess, and unfortunately this is when the supercellular tornado show started. They were needles in a haystack that you had to be perfectly positioned to catch and were seemingly always caught between rainy cores instead. We eventually got tired of driving around in the rain, called the chase, and headed down to Burlington for the night.