Today we wake up in Liberal, Kansas in the bullseye of a
moderate risk and 15% hatched area for EF2-EF5 tornadoes. This is
unprecedented, I can’t remember a moderate risk ever in 7 previous trips, so
far we’ve had one high risk and 3 moderate risks in a week with lesser severe
risks on other days. Ridiculous!
I had a very good breakfast at the very busy but very
efficient Pancake House including the increasingly rare sausage links as
opposed to the patties you normally get. Finally, after passing through Liberal
for many years we go to see Dorothy’s House which is a Wizard of Oz movie
tribute. Didn’t stay long, poor Dorothy looks like she’s had a cosmetic
enhancement bodge job carried out.
We head north then west then up to Moscow and on to Ulysses
and stop at Johnson City on US160 for a pit stop. It’s warm, bordering on hot
with a few cotton wool cumulus clouds drifting aimlessly across the blue sky. Today’s
environment has some capping, the inversion layer of warm air aloft inhibiting
convection. Break the cap, and like the lid of a pressure cooker giving way,
explosive storms can result. Yesterday’s lack of capping allowed numerous
storms to spring up around lunchtime
which ruined the rest of the day. Tornadoes did happen yesterday with sadly
some more fatalities but not where we were. Hopefully today we’ll have bangers and
not roman candles.
We head north from Johnson City on Highway 27 in the
direction of Goodland and a couple of small storms have bubbled up on radar. Go
away! Hopefully the warm front drifting northwards will chase them off. We head
east to Syracuse on US50, leave Kansas and enter “Colorful Colorado”. It’s
picnic time so we stop at Sheridan Lake and shelter from a down pour while
eating our Walmart specials. We head east towards Tribune and back into Kansas,
flip flopping between -6 and -7 hours from British Summer Time. The mobile
phone coverage in now excellent compared with when I first came in 2006, but just
now we’re in a signal void so the intended call home doesn’t happen.
Eventually we get to Tribune, head north and then have a
change of mind and head south back to Tribune. Things are starting to look a
bit messy. We do have a storm which is towering at 60,000 feet, is severe
warned and showing a little rotation…and there is lots of rain. We retrace our
steps north to follow it. The situation is getting messier by the minute with a
line of storms just to the west of the warm front heading north east. A brief
touchdown is reported and another cell is tornado warned. We drive through rain
for what feels like forever, get to Sharon Springs and head east on US40 to try
and find a vantage point. Eventually by Weskan we’re out of the rain.
We do a full circle to get in a better position and we’re
back south at Sheridan Lake where we had our picnic. The storm is now more
isolated, we drive west and stop at Brandon where we are rewarded by a well formed
wall cloud with the leading edge being dragged into the updraft. The wall cloud
becomes a bit ragged so we head back east, not before waiting for a huge chaser
convergence to pass us before we can pull out into traffic. One of the Doppler on Wheels (DOWs) has been
deployed and its massive Doppler radar dish is making sweeps of the storm. We
then drive north on US385 to the I70 driving through incessant rain. That’s us
done, all that’s left is a huge rainy mess and we’ve got the joys of another
180 miles to drive to get to our hotel in North Platte, Nebraska for tomorrow,
likely to be an upslope set up in Wyoming which are prone to putting down
tornadoes. We stop at Colby, Kansas for food and count down the miles to our
hotel.
Total miles: 645
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