This chase easily goes down as my worst of 2015, and likely one of my top 3 worst lifetime. The chase can be summarized using the following image, which should serve as a reminder to everyone that the MOST DANGEROUS aspect of chasing is DRIVING, not just during the chase, but to and from the target area, when it's likely to be dark, you to be tired, and to drop your guard:
That's what the front right corner of my car looks like after hitting a fawn or small doe at 60+ mph.
Summary: saw zero tornadoes, although we saw several likely funnel clouds and some rotating wall clouds, as well as a very suspicious feature well off in the distance after dark. This was despite being on the two storms of the day in the TX panhandle well before sunset. Then we hit the deer.
I left Norman with
@Tim Supinie at around 11 AM. We initially staged a mile north of I-40 on FM 294, just a few miles northwest of Groom. Oh, if only we had just stayed there...
After watching several towers start to go up and get sheared apart to our immediate SSW, we decided to move south a little to get a better vantage point of showers/weak convection well to our southwest. We moved to a spot near the intersection of FM294 and FM1151 about 10 miles east of Claude, where we sat for almost an hour before we got impatient with the one good looking cell that was approaching Tulia at the time. We booked it west and south through the canyon on TX-207, turning around a few miles after popping back out of the canyon. What initially appeared to be a ragged disorganized base a few miles to our west evolved into a weakly rotating, but high based wall cloud that we intercepted near Wayside. It had a moderately strong RFD push. We went back into the canyon, fighting with data availability, when we saw it get tornado warned. It was still rather high based at this time and there wasn't much low-level rotation.
Eventually we cut east and north using FM 2272 through another canyon south of Goodnight. On our way east we saw a pretty tightly rotating wall cloud. It was pretty narrow, and it appared to spit out one or two funnels, but we never saw anything come close to the ground. Then we started to lose it in the fading light and in the canyon. By the time we got back up to US 287, we were about ready to call the chase. We let the initial storm go since it did not appear to be doing anything interesting, and because we were already behind it. We watched the second storm approach us from the southwest for a good 30 minutes. Even after we left our spot at the Goodnight intersection and went back to I-40, we took our time going back through Groom to double check before heading home. All we could see was a black featureless base. So we started home...
Then we started hearing about the "large and extremely dangerous" (at night, who knows what that means) tornado reports near Pampa. After some deliberating we decided to make another attempt, getting off I-40 at McLean and heading up towards Lefors. As we neared Lefors I swear I saw two power flashes way off in the distance, then we saw what looked to be a dark mass contrasting with background orange light, probably from Pampa. We only saw it for a few seconds. Who knows what it was.
We called the chase there. To save a little time, we decided not to go back to I-40 through McLean, but instead to cut through to Wheeler and Elk City. So we kept east on FM 2473. About a mile west of the Kellerville intersection (note: there's no actual town there, just some abandoned buildings), a fawn or small doe popped out of the tall grass to the right of the road and began running across from right to left. I saw it about 1-2 seconds beforehand, but at 70-75 mph all I could do was veer left and hit the brakes. It wasn't enough - we slammed into it around it's shoulder-neck-head region on the front right quarter. We never saw the deer after that, so I presume it died. We cleaned up the damage as best we could (as desolate as it was, and with low clouds and a howling moist wind, it was pretty eerie and pitch black, too) and were actually able to get back to Norman in a reasonable amount of time.
I'm guessing the damage will be in excess of $3000. All things considered, though, this was probably the best possible outcome: neither of us were hurt, and the car was driveable. In fact, it doesn't appear there has been any significant frame or axle damage. Had it been a bigger deer, or if I hadn't veered left, it probably would've finished off the car and/or injured us. We were some distance from the nearest help.
This is also why I'm not a big fan of chasing after dark.