May 19, 2020 Storms

Wyoming

Bill Reid's chase account is here.

Some rather garden variety storms today along with a nice sunset. We ate breakfast at the Village Idiot in Cheyenne. It was nice enough that we decided to eat there the following morning as well.

We had some time to kill before the storms developed just north of us later in the day, so we drove to Curt Gowdy State Park and did some exploring there. This included a short hike around a small dam followed by a bit of driving. The roads were the washboard dirt type, and they were great for the van's suspension. The trick to a smoother drive was to go faster than I wanted to-- I could only maintain this speed for a bit before I wanted to slow down again.

We returned to town for some lunch, then headed east and a little bit south of Cheyenne, hoping for some development along the Cheyenne Ridge.  We stopped for a while in the small town of Carpenter, Wyoming and conversed a bit with a few residents there.  It turns out there are some residents who have not lived there their whole life. I'm not sure why that surprised me so much. It isn't too far from Cheyenne, so one could live in Carpenter and work in Cheyenne.

The storms we hoped for did not develop near Carpenter. One shower did did pop up but soon died. Eventually, a few robust storms developed between LaGrange and Chugwater. As expected, they were pretty high-based, but we eventually found a bit of nice structure. Our first cells became mostly "virga bombs", so we targeted a storm with a better-defined base to our west-southwest. That storm appeared to have some promise, but it never really strengthened much. I took a few stills and a bit of lightning video from the western storm before we headed back to our hotel in Cheyenne (same one we stayed at the night before).

A nice, high-based storm.

Sunset.

We drove about 284 miles.

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