Chasing the Tornado - or Vice Versa

On June 29, 2000, I stopped at a motel in Colby, Kansas on my way to Portland, Oregon. I'd just gotten back from getting food, and had noticed a thunderstorm cell off to the northwest. Earlier, The Weather Channel had shown it moving generally toward Colby, so I checked again. This time a warning was scrolling across the bottom of the screen, complete with the loud beeps. The warning said a tornado had been spotted on radar 18 miles northwest of Colby and moving southeast at 35 mph. Tornadoes don't cover a lot of territory, and are often short-lived. Still, I thought it might be a good idea to get out of the way. I picked up my bags and headed for the car. I was thinking even without a tornado, there could be hail, and I didn't need windshield damage.

I headed south from Colby on Kansas 25, a two-lane blacktop road with a 65 mph speed limit. I kept an eye on the sky, and began to notice an interesting cloud formation to my west and a bit north.

Back north, toward Colby, the storm was bearing down on the town.

I continued south toward US 40, an east-west road about 20 miles south of town. The view to the west was getting more interesting, and I started thinking it was possible I might get to see a tornado. If I did, I knew I'd be luckier than some people who spend a lot of money to go with professional tornado chasers for a week and end up seeing no tornadoes at all.

I stopped a couple more times on my way to US 40 to check development. I don't know how far away the interesting activity was at this point, because you can see so far on the high plains. I just knew heading south continued to be a good idea.

Here's another view as I headed south.

Eventually I reached US 40, and headed west toward Page City, which consists mostly of a large grain elevator and not much else. Somewhere east of there, I stopped, having noticed something dropping out of what certainly looked like the kind of wall cloud I'd seen in many TV shows about tornadoes. In the picture you can see the greenish tint to the clouds above the part hanging down. This shot was taken without any zoom. The camera can zoom to 6X. Note the size of the railroad crossing sign.

I zoomed in for the shot above and the next two below as the tornado developed. Because it was several miles off, I wasn't noticing a whole lot of rotation, so I wasn't 100 percent sure right away that this really was a tornado. Looking at these photos now, I wonder why I doubted it.

The tornado is off to the right of this picture (above), taken to show the wall cloud and the clearing skies off to the west.

This unzoomed shot shows the clouds above the tornado. Notice the greenish coloring, and the streamlined shapes of some of the clouds.

As I took the picture above and the one below, I could see definite movement indicating rotation on the upper right part of the tornado itself, just above where the upper left arm of the railroad sign seems to point.

Another unzoomed picture showing the clouds around the tornado.

There was one other thing I noticed, especially as I took this last shot: The tornado itself did not appear to be moving much to either my left or my right. I knew the storm had been reported moving southeasterly, but the tornado was either moving very slowly or coming right toward me. It was still a few miles off, but it seemed a very good idea to get to a safer place. While this picture below shows the tornado at its most active, it was my last shot. Getting out of the way took precedence over getting more pictures.

I headed further west, passing through Page City and Winona, where I thought there was a road going north, but I wasn't sure where it was. I did not want to end up in some field on a dirt road with a severe storm in the area, and rain was spreading south and it seemed to also spread west. After watching the storm from several miles west of Winona, I headed east. The tornado was gone by then, so it looked like there would only be a little rain to deal with as I headed back toward Route 25.

At the intersection of Routes 40 and 25, the rain was very heavy. I pulled over to let a truck go by. A few minutes later it looked like the rain was letting up, so I headed north on 25 toward Colby and the motel. Along the way, the rain got about as intense as I've ever experienced, slowing me to below 40 mph. Fortunately the road was empty. Off to the west, I could see the sun almost completely obscured by the falling rain. I was probably halfway back to Colby when the rain finally stopped. The motel was still standing, power was on, everything was normal. I could've stayed put, but I would've missed a sight I've always wanted to see - a tornado, live, and at a relatively safe distance.

The next night I was at a friend's house in Denver, where I created the first version of this page on my laptop and uploaded it to my web site on Delphi. Three weeks later I was driving west again, this time with a small U-Haul truck, and stopped for the night in Cozad, Nebraska. Shortly after I arrived, a thunderstorm passed just to the east of the motel, headed south across I-80, the road I'd just driven over. It was a beautiful sight, looking like the classic thunderstorm seen in weather program illustrations - towering cumulus, anvil top, streamers of precipitation falling to the ground, even a rainbow. While it was a few miles off, it was too close for the camera to get a decent picture. I watched it for a while, then returned to my room. I turned on The Weather Channel and saw they were warning of a tornado in that thunderstorm, which by then was off to the southeast. I never saw that second tornado.

Portland, Oregon is not noted for tornadoes and gets very few thunderstorms. That's just fine with me.