May 11, 2023

My fifth day on the road with Jennifer Brindley Ubl, we targeted the Colby area for early afternoon supercells. Some cold air aloft ahead of the surface made me think this was going to be an early show so we scrambled east out of Burlington, CO to get there in time.

We arrived to see billowing white convection and cells congealing into a line with some white hail shafts, but nothing tornadic. We had to temporarily leave the chase for an emergency bathroom break in Winona. A couple of old timers were running the country general store there, and I was hunting for something to buy after running in to use their facilities. I scored a bottle of the original Rain-X in the squirt bottle (not the spray bottle) that had probably been sitting on the shelf for years, but it was still effective.

Back on the chase, we finally started to get some nice flat updraft bases on mature looking cells.

Two bases in view:

An arc of cells to our north finally started showing signs of rotation and tornado warnings were being issued. Unfortunately, these cells were also interfering with each other and we were losing our view to rain. We had one shot for a minutes looking west at a nice RFD clear slot before the cells was swallowed in rain. It picked up a tornado warning, and I followed the highway north northwest in vain, but we weren’t going to attempt the muddy grid roads for something embedded and so abandoned it.

We retargeted new development in clear air well to our south, hoping that the higher CAPE air was the show. This turned out to be the wrong call, as these cells failed to organize, and it was the cells hugging the surface low on the CO/KS border that went tornadic producing a string of tornadoes.

But before we could make a play on that, Brindley got an email. There was a casting call in March for “professional storm chasers and their vehicles” to be in the upcoming Twisters movie. We had applied as a team, but her name was at the top, and we listed the van as hers, hoping they were looking for more female chasers. For the application, I had dressed up the van with a camera dome and wind instruments to look like a real chase vehicle. The casting company’s email said that they’d “love for Jennifer to come down”, and she was to report on set at 7am Monday morning to an address outside of Enid, Oklahoma with her vehicle. Hundreds of miles from home, the featureless van not equipped to play the part, we basically had to drop everything and return home. We called the chase and started heading east, missing the tornado show on the Colorado Kansas border that evening. We continued our drive the next morning, eastbound out of Junction City, Kansas. It was a prime starting position for Friday’s chase, which featured an epic tornado show across eastern Nebraska. The event was made famous by Reed Timmer’s successful penetration of the vortex in his armored vehicle and dramatic drone shot of the entire sequence. But we drove away from everything without even looking back, and for the first time ever, I was ok with missing the show. I had seen tornadoes. This was our chance to do something new, exciting, to live out our fantasies.