I met up with an old chasing/spotter colleague of mine, Shawn Bateman in South Wichita on this afternoon. He had left Kansas City that morning, along with Matt Foster, and (finally) Kevin Polston and his crew. We drove south, then west through Oklahoma, ultimately ending up in Woodward around 5:15pm. By this time, we met up with a group from Iowa who was also waiting for stuff to happen.
We ultimately drove just south of Woodward and set up shop for a while. We heard of the activity that was starting to brew in Southwestern Kansas. (The wedge ultimately developed to our north near Sitka, KS) We stuck to our plan, and stayed put, as we were in a "PDS" tornado watch! Finally, storms started to go up to our south, and we headed toward Elk City. We finally got into the thick of things. However, the storms we saw were heavy rain producers, with not much in the way of structure to be seen.
That
all changed once we got to the 40/44 junction, west of
Clinton near sunset. That's when we saw these beautiful
mammatus clouds in the western sky. They were fantastic!
After numerous pictures were taken, Matt and I shared a
"High Five"...even though the chase wasn't as
successful as hoped, this beautiful sunset made the trip!
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: it was later after the pictures were
developed and subsequently scanned into my home page that I
noticed the "Abe Lincoln" feature.)
On the way back to
Oklahoma City, vivid lightning was everywhere! It was
the best light show I had seen in a few years.
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