The Setup
A low pressure area, dryline, and warm front were setting up over the central Plains. Conditions looked best for the development of supercells over far northern Kansas and southern Nebraska in the late afternoon and early evening. Today was the first day of Tour 4B, which I would be directing. We were scheduled to meet the guests for orientation at 10:00 AM. I was hoping to coordinate with Tour 4A a bit, but Bill decided the tour should head out a bit early, so he gathered for the orientation and headed out quickly. Meanwhile, not all my guests were present. I was missing two. I frantically began calling them, calling back to Tempest Tours headquarters, checking with the front desk to see if the guests had checked in (they had, and they had checked out earlier in the morning), interrupting Bill once to see if they accidentally had joined his tour. This had not happened to me before. These guests had gone AWOL and not informed anyone.
After about 30 minutes, I decided we had done everything we could do to find them, and it was time to leave. We got the van packed up, and we were on our way. I did the orientation in the van. We needed to get going because the target area (Nebraska/Kansas border) was a long drive away.
The Chase
We ate a fast food lunch at Braum's on the north side of Wichita and continued northward on I-135. Storms initiated a bit early just north of I-70, and it looked like we had some we could reach, so I headed east on I-70 past Junction City and exited Kansas 177 northbound. I had gotten ahead of Tour 4A due to efficient use of time, but this ended up being a disadvantage. The first echoes I targeted ended up not being the best ones. Tour 4A had not gone as far east on I-70, and when a more dominant cell developed farther west, they were in a better position to get north on it. Additionally, we had to navigate through Manhattan, and this slowed us down quite a bit.
We eventually got through, but I felt we were a bit behind the game. We were now playing catch-up behind a bunch of storms to our north, moving away from us. With time, these storms clustered together a bit, and they lost some of their discrete/supercellular characteristics. My head was buried in the computer looking at radar and navigation routes, lamenting our lagging position.
Then, a Facebook Messenger message from Matt Phelps came across: "Bob, are you going after that initiation?". I though, "What initiation?" Then, I turned my attention to the sky, which I should have done a bit earlier. There was a new cumulonimbus exploding to the east! I thought, "What the heck?" and instructed our driver to turn east.
An Isolated Supercell
We pulled up on the west side of the new storm, east of the small town of Daykin. Since the storm did not yet have much of a precipitation core, we could easily see underneath the base and note anything that was happening there. Additionally, the core of the storm was right over our east road, so I wanted to wait until it drifted north of the road.
When the rain started filling in, and the storm got out of the way, we drove east again.
As we caught up to our storm to go around its southern flank, another storm developed to our south. I wondered whether it might become a more dominant storm. It didn't really matter, though. It was pretty close to sunset, and we would have to make this storm work for us.
We continued east, past its southern flank. It had a wide, flat base with a bit of precipitation cutting into it. As we got east, it looked a bit more supercellular.
Beatrice
The storm took us near Beatrice. We would have to deal with city traffic and view the storm from a somewhat urban area. I did the best I could to find a spot with an open view to take a look at the storm. We pulled up east of a grain elevator and looked back at the storm. We were just barely east enough to see the barrel updraft above us. I wanted to be farther east, but the town was there. A wall cloud was developing, and the wall cloud was rotating a bit!
We needed to get a bit more east. We pulled into Beatrice, and I found an open view next to a hospital. We pulled into the parking lot. I reported the rotating wall cloud via Radarscope/Spotternetwork. Maybe my excitement (maybe over-excitement) is what got the weather service to issue a tornado warning on the storm. Either way, there was a little bit of a couplet on radar. The NWS Office called me and asked how the wall cloud was doing. By this time, it wasn't rotating quite as much, but it was just as prominent. Over the next 20 minutes or so, the storm crept slowly east while wall clouds cycled along with various RFD intrusions.
Chase Turns Bad
It was getting dark now, and several other storms were developing around our storm, making the situation a bit messier for us. I decided it was time to exit and head to our hotel in Lincoln. With the storms becoming far more numerous around us, along with increasing threats from hail, I tried to find the best route between storms. We exited Beatrice to the west, took Highway 103 north through De Witt (with a hail core right on our tail). I was biting my nails as we stayed barely in front of this core.
We were now ahead of one core with another to our west and another to our east, but there was enough room to stay between them if we stayed on 103. However, when we got to Wilber, there was road construction. The alternate route appeared, to me, to take us into the eastern core, so I decided to go west a couple miles and take another county road (1900). We ended up driving past 1900, and we turned north on 1800 instead. This appeared to be a nicely improved gravel road, and we could easily go 40+ mph and stay ahead of the core. We just had to make it 10 miles to Highway 33, and we'd be back on pavement.
A couple miles in, 1800 abruptly turned to dirt. I could hear this right away as we crossed into the next section and the dirt clods, flinging off our tires, hit the wheel wells of the van. At first, I though this was still okay, but when I saw Brittany turn the steering wheel more than the van responded, I knew we were in trouble. I told her to stop and turn around.
The game was over. We were in mud, and the only thing that had control of our van, if we moved, was slow motion gravity, which would only pull us away from the center of the road and into the ditch if we kept moving. We tried for a bit until we got close enough to the ditch that I said we should stop. We tried getting out and pushing, but this did not help us move away from the ditch. We were done. It was time to call for help.
Our numerous attempts to call a tow truck were unfruitful. I called a couple, and they said they were unable to make it out, especially while the roads were wet. A couple guests Googled "towing companies" and found fraudulent companies where were not in Nebraska. They charged our credit cards and were not going to show up. Eventually, we called the Sheriff dispatcher and asked them to call a tow truck for us. They tried, but nobody would be available. What was worse, wave after wave of heavy rain and high winds was moving across our position, making the road even worse. I knew it was best to just leave the van and free it the next day, but we wanted to try to free it yet this evening if we could.
Eventually, guests called 911 or the sheriff and asked for them to come pick us up. Deputy Escobar drove to the nearest intersection where the road had turned to mud. He could proceed no closer than that or else he, too, would get stuck. We grabbed what we could, ran the 1000 feet, in the rain, back to the deputy's vehicle. From there, he drove us into Wilber, where we met another deputy who would take half of us because it wasn't safe having everyone in the same vehicle. In Wilber, the deputy came pretty close to killing the vehicle getting through floodwater in town, but we made it through. They dropped us at the Fairfield Inn in Crete. From there, I called in Uber, and we got back to Lincoln at 1:30 AM.
Wrap-up
A great chase day ended with a very stressful situation, but we made it back to our hotel.