Well, guess the pics wait until tomorrow, as the nice photo store that developed my prints decided everything needed to be bumped up two stops, and my slide scanner is back in Lincoln.
I set out at around noon from Lincoln, headed east down I-80, took a north turn at Seward and jotted up 81 towards Norfolk. I crossed the cold front boundary coming north (marked by a sharp line of cu stretching into the distance), but the cap was shoving everything back down. Initially, I was going to camp out at Norfolk, but once I got there and stopped for some cell-data, I realized that there was a: some good stuff going up southwest of me, which made me want to divert (didn't -- no way to get ahead of it), and b: a reasonable chance that stuff would fire close to O'Neil, as the triple point was floating around just north of there in South Dakota. This looked promising, as the SPC's meso page had the best shear plotted in this area. I drove west down 70, as I wasn't sure how far south the new convection would begin (and didn't want to end up north of it -- the road options out there aren't what I'd call extensive). Got to 281, pointed north, and was off. Looked quite cool -- I could see two boundaries, one to my west, one to my east, both converging north in the distance. As I was headed up 281 towards O'Neil, I saw a storm go up in what turned out to be South Dakota. This storm plowed up another storm in front of it; both were crossing SE into Nebraska by the time I got to O'Neil.
I stopped to check data; both of these storms had mesos both visually and on radar. Actually, they looked rather frighening as they began to roll in just east of town. Eventually, they merged into one another. While in O'Neil, I saw several rope-like funnels form high up on the westmost meso; one of the funnels managed to wrap around into a corkscrew before it dissapated. I let the storm slide by, as its motion was south-southeast, too southernly to follow on Hwy 275, a NW/SE road. (The core on this storm looked absoloutely vicious!) Once the westmost storm slid by (or, I should say, western core slid by -- it was all one big storm by this point in the shape of a giant horseshoe on radar), I then took an old farm road as far east as I could to get a good view of the eastern storm as it slid by. This storm is the storm that put down the conical white tornado directly to my east-northeast. It was on the ground for a good ten minutes starting at around 6:50ish CST and was beautiful -- my only regret is that I couldn't get closer (like I said, not a great road network out there); I shot the pictures from a good 5 or 6 miles away. But it was beautiful to watch with the naked eye, which is why I chase, anyway. The motion was extremely violent; the top of the cone, which was fairly large, completed a revolution every two to three seconds. The bottom of the cone, before it touched the ground, had lots of smaller "fingers" that would come into being and dissapate quickly as they rotated with the cone. Interestingly, because of my vantage point, I was able to see the atomic convection tower just above the meso stretching high into the sky. The convection was strong enough that I could actually see the clouds billowing upward; normally, I have a hard time detecting convective movement with the naked eye.
After the tornado lifted and the meso of the second storm was to my southeast, I got on 275 to get as close as I could without entering the core. I got to the outskirts of Ewing right after the tornado supposedly came through. No tornado damage, though I'm guessing the RFD did a number on the town; lots of branches down (I stopped for a few minutes to help some locals clear the highway), some power wires down, etc. The core was just intense looking (partly because of the angles of the sun); the scene litereally went from clear skies to 100% obscured by precip in about 1/2 mile. I could see it flying in sideways from the north at a rapid pace (producing a wonderful 180 degree rainbow), then actually taking a bit of a wrap to the east as I looked a few miles to the south. Needless to say, I didn't drive into this! Once the core passed, I drove into Ewing and looked with sadness at the wonderful storm as it rolled away to my south. No more chasing it; while there was a south road option if I wanted to drive further east (through the weaker bands of precip), the storm's core completely obscured everything to my south, so it would have been pointless. I wasn't brave/dumb enough to core punch this thing.
After a year of mostly just catching nice spinning sups with sculpted wall clouds, getting to see a beautiful white cone was the icing on the cake. The whole trip reminded me of why I like to do this: I got to see Nebraska, got to meet some locals ("Yup, that wasn't more than an F2 at first, but then it definately got goin' to an F3! I was right under it at first!"), got to experience the zen of sitting all by myself underneath one of God's fists. And then I got to sit there with a big fat grin on my face as I watched the winds dance in a white circle for ten minutes. If that's not worth a day's worth of gas and two skipped meals, well, I don't know what is.
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