Bighorns Boomers
Bighorn Mountains, WY
17 Jun 13
SHORT: Two rounds of morning to midday storms in beautiful Bighorn Mtns., rain from weak/dying convection WY/MT border.
LONG:
Today was intended to be a leisurely trek from Buffalo WY to MT, but not by the Interstate. Instead we had all day, thanks to a lack of substantial severe-storm potential until day-2 in central MT. As such, we aimed for a reunion with the Cloud Peak Skyway and its resplendent vistas of the Bighorn Mountains, followed by a trip across the Bighorn Basin to a stop somewhere in south-central MT for the night. We weren’t planning on a storm chase and didn’t have one, per se.
Yet storms found us–and in one of the most scenic of places. A line of elevated thunderstorms rolled through the mountains in mid-late morning. This unusually encountered but most welcomed situation offered forenoon storm-light, and very interesting backgrounds for wildflower-landscape photography that ranged from eerily brooding closeups to deeply textured, pastoral meadow scenes one might better expect in the Austrian Alps. Given Elke’s heritage from the latter area, is it any wonder that she so wondrously appreciates the June wildflower show in the Bighorns?
Adding to our gallery from 2007, we also focused up-close on some gorgeous floral displays, whether from just the ubiquitous lupines, lupines with arrowleaf balsamroot, smoke towers–towers of prairie smoke flowers that is, Nelson’s larkspur (a highly toxic plant belying its beauty), mountain goldenbanner, a variety of false dandelion, or the common white locoweed that is the bane of western stockmen. We even saw a double puff of smoke!
Round one of storms passed quickly and harmlessly NE of the Cloud peak area by midday, however it left behind two prime ingredients for further convective development in a weakly capped, high-country lift regime: an outflow boundary and moisture–each of which were cooked in sunshine at ten thousand feet. Duly primed, additional deep convection began towering upward throughout the central and southern Bighorns, including overhead. Safety considerations (don’t want the first lightning strike to zap one’s noggin) and lunchtime hunger prompted us to evacuate the high country and head toward the basin, whereupon we took one final look back at a now storm-blanketed range.
Late lunch in Worland (which was pretty good) preceded a trek NNW toward Montana, through Greybull and Lovell WY. This part of the basin is desolate, with a great deal of bare, rocky ground and salt deposits. That’s related to the very dry climate, a result of being surrounded by mountain ranges with only a small gap in the north. Even that small gap sometimes lets low-level moisture creep in; so the vegetation got a little greener as we cruised out of Lovell toward the MT border. An expansive area of mostly orphaned anvil wafted overhead from some earlier storms in the Absaroka Mountains to our W, dropping a light, gentle rain on us as we crossed the border. What a peculiar novelty this was!
Rain in such a dessicated area often cools the air a lot evaporatively and leads to a rich, earthy aroma, and this was no exception. We welcomed both as Montana welcomed us. We enjoyed the views of the Bighorn River from the highway, called in motel reservations in Roundup for the night, bought a road atlas at the Billings Barnes and Noble outlet, got a late dinner in Roundup, and settled in for the night…anticipating our first central MT chase day ahead. This northern Plains trek already had been richly rewarding, and the following day would pile on that reward with a good dose of adventure!
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Our PING trail for this day.
Thunder Basin Thunder
Ogallala, Thunder Basin and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands (NE/WY/SD)
17 Jun 13
SHORT: Early elevated storm CDR, back-of-MCS mammatus show eastern WY.
LONG:
BANG! That was how our day started, as a very close lightning strike awoke us from slumber in our motel room. Elevated storms had been rumbling overhead for some time during the early daylight period, their rain pattering a stay-asleep-please lullaby outside; but that vicious blast on the trailing side of it all was a literal eye-opener. [During a later visit to CDR, we found out from the motel proprietors that the strike split a tree in half about a block from there.] I PINGed the rain, of course.
Anticipating that any storm potential on this day would be roughly on the way between CDR and our intended destination of Buffalo WY, Elke and I started the day with a short driving tour of CDR that we have been wanting to do for years, then saw another long-desired destination there: the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State College. Though small, the museum was well worthwhile–a great tribute to the life of the High Plains pioneer writer and documentation of the hardscrabble life she and her parents led in settling the Sandhills.
Leaving the museum, we saw the sun peek out but also heard distant rumblings to the W. A small, elevated thunderstorm was riding the top of the outflow pool from the morning convection. While Elke gathered some supplies at Wal-Mart, I found a nearby hilltop from which to enjoy the view. The verdant prairies of a Nebraska Panhandle springtime can make even an ordinary, elevated storm seem majestic and beautiful! We ate lunch from that hillside Country Kitchen with the grand SW view, then hit the road NW into the SW corner of SD.
Forcing for deep convection appeared rather muddled on this day, with marginal shear for supercells. Still, with…
- A weak cap in modified UNR sounding,
- An outflow boundary from the morning storms arching back across eastern WY to our SW and W,
- Orographic features in the form of Black Hills and Bighorn Mountains looming to the NW and NNW, and
- Prospects for strong and sustained insolation…
…we had good cause to expect seeing a storm at some point this day. We planned to dabble in whatever convective pleasures the atmosphere offered, then settle into Buffalo for the night with a trip through the Bighorns planned day-2 and some Montana chasing on the docket day-3. Only a few days out of Norman, our Oklahoma home nonetheless seemed so far away and long ago as we trekked across the grand vistas of the northern High Plains and around the SW rim of the Black Hills.
Visiting the adjoining Ogallala (NEb) and Buffalo Gap (SD) National Grasslands for a spell, we did some short hikes over the wide-open Plains, dodging flowering cacti while watching persistent but non-deepening high-based convective towers to our SW, over WY and along the boundary. In the distance, convection built over the Black Hills and small, fuzzy anvils started to spread off the eastern slopes of the Bighorns.
We zigzagged the mixture of paved and unpaved roads characteristic of southwestern Fall River County, skirting just close enough to the Black Hills convection to see that it was rather high-based, poorly organized, incipiently outflow-dominant and unlikely to survive in any chase-worthy form after peeling out of the hills. Meanwhile, the persistent towers to our SW stayed about the same height they had been for two hours, and the anvils got enticingly dark and thick to our W. A check of radar during a brief data-availability interlude, however, revealed a very messy multicell-supercell clustered structure that was starting to accelerate SSE across WY and surf its own outflow.
Rather than make a mad run 100 or more miles to our S to get ahead of the charging convective mess, while adding 4-6 hours to the journey to get near or past CYS (and well out of our way) then back up, we decided to take a more leisurely approach. We remained on the planned westerly track, let the growing convective mass gather its cold pool and pass off to our SW, then slip in behind its bowing forces of rampage and see what storm light would greet us. This choice didn’t disappoint!
Appropriately named on this day, the Thunder Basin National Grassland hosted a spectacular display of mammatus (looking overhead at first, then toward the S). The amazing mammatus field evolved into sinuous forms resembling pods of swimming marine mammals (view with landscape foreground), as it moved fairly rapidly southward across the open rangeland apace with the parent MCS that, by this time, was blasting parts of SE WY with no mercy whatsoever.
We stood in cool outflow air, thoroughly immersed in the resplendent scene passing off toward the southern horizon, until sunshine came out and limited contrast. Once the convection and mammatus departed, so did we, shuffling off to Buffalo–Wyoming that is, via Gillette and I-90. A fine dinner in town and a day in the Bighorns area lay ahead.
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Our PING trail for this day.
High Plains Lightning Festival
Colorado-Nebraska Border Region
13 June 11
SHORT: Began in BFF. Waited in SNY. Avoided outflow-surfing CO/NEb border storms to intercept supercell near AKO, saw probably non-tornadic dust whirls with storm merger there. Fantastic twilight lightning display from elevated storms along border S of IBM.
LONG:
Elke and I started the day in BFF, targeting the general area of the CO/NEb border SE of there. I wasn’t particularly jazzed by the weak lower-tropospheric winds in the forecast, figuring outflow and/or storm splits would be a problem. Still, it’s the high plains in early June with adequate moisture, upslope flow and at least marginal shear. The answer? Be there.
We waited a good, long time at a hilltop outside SNY, just NW of a dryline that eventually would fire up a tornadic HP supercell in the horrible road network and terrain of the Sandhills. We saw those towers to the distant NE, but chose not to pursue given the great difficulties involved with storm intercepts in those parts.
Meanwhile, we listened to meadowlarks and, on radar displays, watched chaser icons on SpotterNetwork zigzag back and forth across the area in impatience as the lack of focused action. Fuzzy storms began to fire between the Laramie Range and Cheyenne Ridge, which was no surprise; their distant bases were so high we could see them from SNY. I wasn’t impressed. Red dots converged on I-80 and headed W. We sat, waiting and hoping instead for dryline development to access richer moisture to our SE and E.
Finally, off to the distant SW, two storms erupted near and N of the Palmer Divide in Colorado. This was near the very southern fringes of our forecast area; but as nothing much was happening with the dryline nearby, and the storms were reachable, we decided to go have a look. Along the way SW, through the convoluted maze of roads that is Sterling CO, the southeast storm attracted quite a few chaser icons. The NW storm didn’t, was closer, and was in a similar environment; so we headed toward AKO to intercept it.
Alas, along the way, the SE storm calved off a big left-mover and died! Moreover, the left mover shot toward the inflow region of our target storm like a torpedo hell-bent on mutually assured destruction of both storms. Briefly, we got a view of the NW supercell’s mesocyclone area to our WSW before the left-mover’s core arrived; and it looked like a somewhat higher-based version of a North Texas HP “Stormzilla”. This meant big hail; so it was imperative to get S fast.
Yet there loomed the left-mover over the road to our S, likely bearing ice bombs also. It got there as we did, just S of AKO. The two storms started to merge overhead, and in the tiny gap between their cores, two strongly rotating dust whirls appeared less than a mile to our W, about 3 minutes apart. [I was driving and driving hard, so…no photos!]
Though a narrow, ribbon-shaped updraft had formed overhead at the merger location, we could see no obvious rotation in it. I attributed the whirls to gustnado-like vortices being stretched where the two gust fronts met. We maintained an equatorward bearing, encountering only marginal severe hail at best (to our relief).
Arriving just S of the combined storms, which indeed were killing each other, we photographed the dying supercell across rain-drenched corn stubble S of AKO. It was good to see Steve Hodanish and to swap Hodo stories with a co-worker of his, and also, to talk with a few other friendly storm observers whom I hadn’t met before. Yet we were essentially stormless, parting ways and headed back toward our various bases for the night. All that was left, for now, was outflow spinning a windmill under a dark and stormy high plains skyscape.
We headed toward lodging in the Nebraska Panhandle, soaking in the sights of Pawnee National Grasslands in anticipation of spending a couple of upcoming non-chase days of roaming around some of our favorite haunts around the Black Hills, not counting on any more atmospheric excitement. As good fortune sometimes plays on previously under-performing storm days, the night brought about an unexpected–and most welcome–show of splendor that made our night!
A short line of elevated and high-based thunderstorms erupted over the WY-NEb border region atop the outflow pool from all the late-afternoon activity, and moved SE across the southwestern Panhandle and across the Cheyenne Ridge. Evening storms like this in the High Plains can spark profusely, and these absolutely did! We found a vantage just over the CO/NEb border S of IBM (Kimball, not the company) and began shooting away at the approaching spectacle. Assorted forked and in-cloud displays slashed across the fading twilight, their reports blasting resonantly across the wide-open landscape. Soon, some cloud-to-air discharges flickered forth, followed by yet more (and closer) sky-splitting CG action. Wow…what a show!
The lightning was getting too close, though; so we drove through the translucent core of the thunderstorm line a short distance into IBM, crossing a few miles of small hail (with almost no rain!) along the way. I’ll never forget the sight of countless thousands of little white hail balls in the high beams–cascading dots of brightness, the only form of light shining back at me along that dark High Plains highway.
After securing a motel room near the edge of town (like we like to do), we noticed the sparkling display still underway to our SE, and headed back out past the E edge of town for a little crawler-lightning show in the trailing precip region. And with a few more flashes to light up the midnight hour across the western Nebraska prairie, bedtime drew nigh, our storm-hungry palates duly satiated. I had very few lightning photos to show for 2011 until this night, when the heavens unloaded electrical gifts one after another in a most dazzling and appreciated fashion.