Pretty much the same story as Justin and Mickey... Gabe and I left OUN about noon, heading for Woodward. By the time we got to Woodward, we saw that there was one cell in extreme ne TX panhandle, and another just south of that one. As we headed west, the northern cell died, while the southern storm looked healthy. We ended up stopping northeast of Catesby on Hwy 283 to watch the storm cross into OK from TX. It organized rather rapidly, with a nice, rotating wallcloud, and no real RFD to speak of. A couple of other wallclouds developed over the next 30-40 minutes, and there was a nice funnel that we observed as we sat on Hwy 47 WNW of Fargo (W of Woodward). We continued to follow the storm to Fort Supply. I had okay data coverage, so we were able to get radar updates on GRLevel3 rather consistently. At that time, the storm was getting a nice hook echo, with decent rotation in the lowest scan. In fact, I thought we were going to see a tornado while the meso was south of Dunlap, as there was very rapid rotation immediately east of us as we travelled east on E310 Rd. At any rate, when we got to Ft Supply, we were faced with a decision.. We could head north on 183 and hope to find a good east option to follow the storm, or we could head south-southeast on 183, and hope to find a good NNE option. Since the storm had a slight northerly component to its motion, we opted to take the north option on 183, and then see if we could navigate non State highways. Errrr. Wrong idea. We slip-slidded around for the next 90 minutes, someone managing to NOT get stuck on roads such as E220Rd and E200 Rd south of Selman. Thank goodness I did donuts in parking lots after heavy snowfalls when I was younger, as that helped me learn how to recover from multiple fish-tails at high speeds. Of course, I knew that if I stopped in this 6" muddy mess, I'd get stuck in a hurry. At any rate, we somehow managed to find some pavement (Hwy 50) south of Freedom and Camp Houston. By this time (about 6:40pm), I was getting tired from relatively high-stress driving from the past hour. We tried to get a closer view of the base as we headed out of Alva, but it was getting dark, so we called it a night. We did meet up with Amos and Eric at the Alva Sonic, however. It was also at that time that we realized that we missed the tornado that Amos and Eric saw by 10 minutes. Ugh.
Overall, it was nice to see our target area verify. This chase played out a lot like the 5-5-02 Canadian TX chase for me, during which I got caught with bad road options as the storm passed east of Canadian... I got behind the storm and was never able to get back ahead of it. The roads north of Woodward are horrible to say the least, unless you get lucky enough to stay on paved roads. I felt lucky to find a few gravel segments, as that at least gave me some traction relative to the dirt/mud garbage. Otherwise, it was quite frustrating to continually be 10 miles behind the storm as my tired churned away at the mud. This reinforces my chase strategy of never getting behind a storm, period. Hosed me on 5-5-02, hosed us today. I'm just glad we made it through w/o gettting stuck! Oh yeah, and my Earthmate GPS failed to work most of the time we were on the dirt roads, at the exact times I needed it most... :roll:
Thanks to Dan Dawson and Robyn Tanamachi for chase discussion, as we caught up with them near Fort Supply. In addition, thanks to Mark Oerther and his chase partner for lending me their GPS when me failed. This latter turned out to be a bad idea, since we got seperated when I realized that my front-wheel drive needed speed to get past the heavy mud pathces, while he had to take his rear-wheel drive truck slower.
Edit: I did see the same Explorer with 3 antenna's on it once on the backroads (I think) and again as they followed by in to Alva. Well, they weren't "following" me, but they were right behind me. "Hi!" to whoever that was!
