Doing it the Ordway

11 June 2015

After a couple of days up in the Rocky Mountain National Park, followed by a day which, largely as forecast, amounted to no reportable weather, it was time to hit the Colorado front range again. Today looked set to produce quite a few storms, even if none of them appeared likely to be overly severe, there appeared a good chance of getting in amongst some interesting weather.

We started in our faithful starting point of Limon and, for once, actually headed south. We went passed our recent haunts of Punkin centre and on passed Cambo’s favourite horses, with only one double-u-turn on the way down (we thought, shortly after leaving Limon, that a storm to its west looked good, but changed our mind again fairly quickly, so this time we only had to drive a mile or two of road 3 times before our minds were made up).

By the time we got to the next reasonable size town, called Ordway, to the south we could see a few storms erupting, but with no ‘best’ targets yet we decided to wait a while, take some time-lapse, and try not to get eaten by the mosquitos.

About half an hour later a particular storm looked best so we headed back through Ordway, stopping again at their shop, but held up this time while the French guy from a chase tour that had stopped there, tried to interpret the cashier saying “will that b’yall for ya today?”. Unfortunately he’d incorrectly gauged this as being something important he must understand, rather than something needing a nod and smile.

We intercepted our first storm a little north of Ordway, and it was looking pretty good. We had to take a couple of country roads as the storm had cut off our paved route, which always makes for a slightly more exciting path, particularly with the amounts of dust that the storm kicks up as it goes. We got ahead of it and enjoyed some good views as it matured.

As it passed us it became ever more outflow dominant, kicking up dust all over the place and producing more, larger, hail – reaching tennis ball size in places according to reports.

 We followed it for a while before letting it pass over us just south of Holly (the second time we’ve done this, in the same town, during this trip).

After it had passed we decided to take a look at another storm further to the south. We headed down the road, but only for about 20 minutes, before a new storm started heading north straight up this road. It was following a very unusual motion and briefly looked pretty awesome. We stopped just in front of it with some chasers we’d met a couple of times lately, before we headed back north to escape its hail.

Having had this storm dispatch us back to the north it was time to call it a day and head for my posthumous birthday dinner in our regular hideout of Applebees in Garden City, the horizons framed by various distant updrafts in the evening light creating great backdrop for the journey.

That's all folks!

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