July 5, 2020 Storms

Gillette, Wyoming

Today was Day 1 of Tempest Tours Tour 9 of 2020. It was the final tour of the season, which had produced plenty of well-structured supercells but no well-structures, definite tornadoes. The week showed some promise, with a tough moving across the Northern Plains into Minnesota by Wednesday. We could continue east as the system progressed, making for a somewhat well-planned chase itinerary. Our first chase targeted some high-based storms coming off the mountains in Wyoming. Expectations weren't very high, but there are sometimes surprises.

Storms developed as expected over the mountains to our west and drifted north-northeast gradually toward I-25. We made a first attempt to catch a storm near Wright and hopped off I-25 for a bit, but then I realized we would be stern-chasing it, so I opted to hop back on I-90 and come around again. It also appeared to be a left mover, so I did not have much hope for it. Time to find a better, right-moving storm.

We arrived in Gillette with storms coming towards us. I did not like being on an interstate highway during a chase, and the road network wasn't giving us the best opportunities to drive up to the most interesting features on the storms, so I decided to drive southwest of town on Highway 50 and watch the storm approach. It got a bit frustrating here because the a base was approaching, but the best base was again off to the west on the northwest side of the storm. To chase a left-moving feature would be to admit defeat, but that looked to be the only option right now. We had to drive back through Gillette and then took U.S. Highway 14/16 north. We were under some rather featureless structure, but there appeared to be a decent base to the west, so we continued toward Spotted Horse. The road curved back west, allowing us to get in front of these features but also to avoid the likely hail-producing core behind it. The structure didn't look very impressive when we stopped. This was a bit frustrating.

Storms near Spotted Horse.

Other storms new grew to the southeast, but there were no roads directly to them. People who were watching my Spotternetwork icon wondered what I was doing. It didn't look like I was chasing well, but the storms weren't presenting themselves in a typical fashion. With the Spotted Horse storm now pretty weak and the best part of that storm now to our southeast, it was time to turn around.

We ended up pulling over at a spot about halfway back to Gillette and watched as the storms moved away to the northeast. I felt like I was giving up a bit early, but the view was really good from here, and I'm not sure we would have improved our situation by driving 20 miles back south for our next northeast option. We would have been pretty far behind the storms at that point.

A 60 mile drive would have been required to intercept these storms 20 miles to our east.

Hail had fallen where we stopped.

A mammatus-filled sunset.

A tornado look-alike in the distance.

Overall, it was a somewhat frustrating day, and I felt a little bit off my game (that happens sometimes), but we did have some nice storms to play with, and we also had an opportunity to enjoy some nice sunset-illuminated mammatus.

Our total route from Denver-- about 446 miles of driving.

This is zoomed in on the norther part of our route (during chasing).

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