June 2, Todd and I set out on a storm chasing adventure in the Texas panhandle. Lucky for us, Todd's parents live in Amarillo and hooked us up with warm beds to sleep in, hot meals every night, and an abundant supply of snacks for the road. Both June 3th and 4th we set out with high expectations of seeing severe weather along the western side of the panhandle near the New Mexico border. We were successful both days but I will never forget June 4 as the first time I saw a rotating wall cloud and my first funnel cloud.

Our initial problem was deciding to go north to Clayton or south toward Clovis, both small towns near the Texas/New Mexico border and both seemed to have great potential for storm initiation. After taking a trip to Wally-World to pick up film, and fill up on gas, we reassessed all of our options and decided to go southwest toward Hereford. At the time, we were fairly confident we would see storms develop near the border and move southeast. We checked out the satellite and read up on the latest discussions at the Hereford library and were still confident we were in a good place.

So I don't lose your interest, I will skip the boring details. We ended up going west our of Hereford toward the New Mexico border where a Tornado Watch was in affect and we could see a cumulus field meandering along an outflow boundary. We went out under the cumulus field when we decided to go further west after several other storm chasers flew by. Half hour later we were on the mother of all developing HP Supercells. We called our friendly Baseops Meteorologist (Rich Weis) who informed us we were looking at a storm with a Tornado Warning. We hopped back in the truck and drove until we found a nice spot to view the storm again. Little did we know it was the perfect platform with 2 escape routes and the supercell would develop right in front of our eyes.

Todd set up his tripod and video camera and started filming while I took about a roll of stills. We stayed at that spot for about 20 minutes until the storm decided it was time for us to leave. In the meantime, it developed one heck of a hook echo and dropped a very brief funnel.

The problem that Todd and I realized later was we were so excited about the storm and what we were witnessing, we ignored our options to keep ahead of the storm and briefly became the hunted. By the time we felt safe enough to resume the chase, we were so far out of position, we decided instead to head home.

For those of you who are still reading and moderately interested, here is a great shot of the storm superimposed on my GPS map. You can see the cold air advancing southward that dropped dime size hail on my truck as we jetted out of there. We stopped a few miles down the road to re-evaluate the situation and try to find a road that would take us south. That is when we saw some dust kick up and head right for us.

On film, these images were probably some of the most frightening, although in restrospect, we weren't in that much danger. We just didn't want to have to drive through it!!

We decided to continue going west until we could find a north road and go after another storm we heard had great potential. Obviously we would have liked to have stayed on the first storm but thought by now we could never catch up and get back into a good position....not to mention it was already 8ish and were at least 2-2.5 hours from Amarillo. The problem with this was we had to follow a dirt road that had no outlet for several miles. One road was misplaced on our road atlas so a 30 minute detour turned into an hour plus!! Thank goodness the scenery was wonderful. We drove along the never-ending dirt road, stopping occasionally to view the mammatus. That, and the nonstop lightning brought us right home and made the 2.5 hour drive seem like nothing.

By then, it was close to midnight but the Shoemakes had waited up for us knowing we were leaving early the next day to go back to Houston. After inhaling a long overdo dinner during storytime, we were treated to BROWNIES!!!! A perfect end to a perfect storm chase.