Click here to see Bill Reid's summary of the chase.
I began the day with a run into downtown Raton. The run awakened my digestive tract after a couple days in the van and not getting a lot of exercise, so it ended up being a shorter run than I had hoped, and I got back to the hotel quickly. The restaurant at Casa Lemus hotel was closed for breakfast, so we enjoyed another McDonald's breakfast and turned north on I-25. We were anticipating another day of storms between Trinidad and Raton, and that's basically what we got.
Since we began the day in our general target area, we decided to kill some time in the morning doing other things. First, we stopped in Trinidad and looked around the town. We decided to take our group picture in front of the courthouse there. After we had seen enough of Trinidad, we continued north on I-25 and exited at Aguilar. We drove up a Canyon to a small village called Gulnare where we took some pictures of a small church and abandoned school. We returned to Aguilar and tried some more old building photography there, but we were told to leave the property. That got us to early afternoon, and there was no place in Aguilar to eat lunch, so we drove north to Walsenburg. One thing that's perfectly clear about this part of Colorado: there are a LOT of cannabis dispensaries. I would guess it's now one of the biggest drivers of the economy of this area.
After our stop in Walsenburg, a storm developed near Trinidad, so we dropped back south.
A new storm develops south of us as we leave Walsenburg.
This small base came up on us and gave us a few minutes of heavy hail.
After we took a bit of hail from this small storm, it began to look less interesting, so we drove up onto the Raton Mesa to view other storms. One strengthened a bit to our west and developed some supercellular characteristics. We stopped for about an hour or so while the storm spun its way toward us. As it approached our position, it started to look a little less interesting, so we drove back toward Raton and spent some time very close to the updraft base while looking for other storms. None really appeared, so we started our drive north on I-25. It looked like we would need to be in Wyoming in a couple days, so it was good to begin the journey.
A storm viewed from Raton Mesa.
Our Raton Mesa storm started to look a bit interesting before shrinking a bit.
Full view of the updraft as the storm spins its way toward us.
One last, quick look on our way back to Raton.
The updraft base is now a big smaller as we stopped near I-25.
We found another strong cell near Colorado City and stopped just after sunset to take some still photos and time lapses of the storm as it drifted away from us. From that point, we continued northward to Pueblo to spend the night in the west part of town (there seemed to be a higher incidence of COVID in the eastern part, so we avoided that area).
