JamesCaruso
Staff member
Surprised this thread hadn't already been started, but then when I went to look at the 2021 version so that I could use a consistent naming convention, I realized I started last year's too LOL (Edit: Actually, although I show up as the OP for the 2021 thread, I think Warren may have actually started it, according to his post which appears second... I think mine may have been moved by a MOD from another thread...)
My 2022 chase vacation began on Saturday, May 21 with arrival in Denver, in mid-30s temps after an overnight snowfall throughout the I-25 corridor, and we flew back home from Denver to Philadelphia on Saturday, June 4. In planning the trip, I considered May 21 as an available chase day (with a relatively early landing, depending on target of course...) and could have flown home on Sunday, June 5, but I always like to leave that extra "transition day" between chasing and back to work on Monday, unless that last Saturday looks *really* good.
Anyway, considering the available chase days as running from 5/21 through 6/3, we had 14 available days. Of these, we had only 8 chase days, and one of those (5/28) was what I call a "lazy man's chase," when it is not really expected to be a very favorable day and chasing is just a "see what we can see" proposition that is secondary to repositioning, sightseeing, or other primary activities.
If I were to judge my 2022 chase vacation by normal criteria, I would say it was somewhere between "below average" and "disappointing." However, this was my first chase vacation with my son, and that made it incredibly meaningful and rewarding. Now certainly there was an emotional component to this as a father-son road trip and bonding experience. But even staying with more objective criteria, I would say it was a great trip because of the wide range of atmospheric phenomena I was able to show him, the extensive range we covered, and the places we were able to go.
Before we left, I was hoping of course to be able to get him to a tornado (and I did!) But I also wanted him to see various other things that would all be new experiences for someone growing up in a suburban area on the East Coast: Mammatus. Large hail. Hail accumulation. Hail fog. Zero-visibility blowing dust and "car wash" torrential rain. High wind. Shelf clouds. Lightning. Full rainbows. I had to remind myself that not all of these things are attainable in a given year. But you know what? We saw and experienced just about all of them! I'm not saying every one of these events was the highest-end, best-possible example of each phenomenon, but we got it all. Most years, this would not have been "satisfying enough" for me... Sadly, I have come to take such things for granted... But seeing it through my son's eyes helped me regain the perspective and appreciation that I had when I first started chasing back in 1996. I hope I can retain this perspective in the future.
I was also hoping to take my son to all of my favorite places on the Plains: Major cities/towns such as Colorado Springs, Amarillo (including Cadillac Ranch), Oklahoma City, and Wichita; Great chase regions such as the eastern Colorado Plains, the TX panhandle and down around Lubbock, New Mexico, where the land seems to suddenly change to desert-like scrub brush as soon as you cross the border, and the Sandhills - not great for chasing, but beautiful in its own right; Restaurants, like the Open Range Grill in Ogallala, Abuelo's in Amarillo, the Kincaider brewpub in Broken Bow, NE, Larkspur in Wichita, the Bourbon Street Cafe and Mojo's Blues Club in Bricktown OKC, the Cork and Pig in Odessa, and White House in Odessa. Every year has its own chase route and you never know where you'll end up - one of the joys of chasing - but somehow we were able to get to every one of these places! Having some down days helped, and we probably went out of the way a few times to make sure we hit these spots, but we were fortunate to have the opportunity to get to them. The only one of my favorite regions that we didn't get to chase in, or even go through, was southwestern KS. Having a chance to see Garden of the Gods, blanketed in snow from an overnight snowfall, and smelling the pine in mid-30s temperatures, was a great experience - a new one for me, too, and it felt like we were back at Christmastime... We discovered some new favorite restaurants as well. We hit six states in all: Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska.
Anyway, here's a quick rundown of the 8 chase days - detailed reports have all just recently been posted:
5/23 - Morton tornado - incredible (and ironic) for my son to be able to see a tornado on his very first chase - although, unfortunately, it was fairly distant and we couldn't enjoy it too long without falling behind, and dust obscured the storm for the rest of the chase - but an exciting day with lots of great visuals and intense inflow wind with blowing dust, at times taking visibility to zero.
5/24 - HP in southwestern TX, ultimately got hosed up in traffic and flooding in Midland, bailed on the storm and missed a new meso and tornado on the eastern flank that produced a tornado near Garden City, TX.
5/28 - this is the "lazy man's chase day"; my primary goal was to take my son to Lake McConaughy and the Open Range Grill near Ogallala, hoping for some storms to look at in the late afternoon/evening, which worked out pretty much as planned.
5/29 - targeted near Norfolk; storms went up late, around 7pm, forcing us all the way back to the southwest, near Broken Bow which we had passed through earlier for lunch at the Kincaider... Almost 2.5 hours required to finally get the updraft base in view north of Burwell, right at dark...
5/30 - the "alleged big day"... Blew off the SD/MN target and went for the secondary, dryline play in KS, to no avail... Seemed that every cell died just as we got to it, as we dropped north along the line from Strong City all the day down to Douglass... Not a single tornado report in KS, and I don't think there were even any tornado warnings!
5/31 - played stationary front in the Texas panhandle... Brief supercell structure but storms clustered and we shifted position to other storms north of I-40 in OK, only to get a big HP mess.
6/1 - another day along the stationary front, this time in southeastern NM. Probably one of the better supercells since Morton day. Also experienced several inches of hail accumulation and a hail fog, which was not only new for my son but also something I hadn't seen for years...
6/3 - last chase day, southeastern Colorado, near Kim. Nice HP but missed tornadic storms a little further north near Lamar.
Over 5,200 miles driven, as we went from Denver to southwestern TX, up to Nebraska, all the way back down to southeastern NM, and back home via Denver.
The good news is, my son is hooked, and I hope he will be accompanying me every year from now on. After my daughters graduate high school, hopefully they will be joining me as well!
Having gone back and read my 2021 recap, it turns out this is the second consecutive season that I came back content - not only for the reasons discussed above, but also, like in 2021, I did not make any major mistakes to come home regretting or ruminating over. Sure, I can identify some 2022 mistakes - probably more so than in 2021: Not getting to the Morton storm sooner on 5/23. Being too quick to bail on the 5/24 chase instead of trying harder to get to the eastern flank and the Garden City, TX tornado. Targeting, and staying near, the Route 160 latitude instead of the Route 50 latitude in southeastern CO on the last chase day, 6/2. But none of those are so egregious as to cause me any continuing angst once I got home, and in fact I was glad for my son to also be exposed to those aspects of chasing - the unavoidable second-guessing, disappointment, and seeming randomness.
My 2022 chase vacation began on Saturday, May 21 with arrival in Denver, in mid-30s temps after an overnight snowfall throughout the I-25 corridor, and we flew back home from Denver to Philadelphia on Saturday, June 4. In planning the trip, I considered May 21 as an available chase day (with a relatively early landing, depending on target of course...) and could have flown home on Sunday, June 5, but I always like to leave that extra "transition day" between chasing and back to work on Monday, unless that last Saturday looks *really* good.
Anyway, considering the available chase days as running from 5/21 through 6/3, we had 14 available days. Of these, we had only 8 chase days, and one of those (5/28) was what I call a "lazy man's chase," when it is not really expected to be a very favorable day and chasing is just a "see what we can see" proposition that is secondary to repositioning, sightseeing, or other primary activities.
If I were to judge my 2022 chase vacation by normal criteria, I would say it was somewhere between "below average" and "disappointing." However, this was my first chase vacation with my son, and that made it incredibly meaningful and rewarding. Now certainly there was an emotional component to this as a father-son road trip and bonding experience. But even staying with more objective criteria, I would say it was a great trip because of the wide range of atmospheric phenomena I was able to show him, the extensive range we covered, and the places we were able to go.
Before we left, I was hoping of course to be able to get him to a tornado (and I did!) But I also wanted him to see various other things that would all be new experiences for someone growing up in a suburban area on the East Coast: Mammatus. Large hail. Hail accumulation. Hail fog. Zero-visibility blowing dust and "car wash" torrential rain. High wind. Shelf clouds. Lightning. Full rainbows. I had to remind myself that not all of these things are attainable in a given year. But you know what? We saw and experienced just about all of them! I'm not saying every one of these events was the highest-end, best-possible example of each phenomenon, but we got it all. Most years, this would not have been "satisfying enough" for me... Sadly, I have come to take such things for granted... But seeing it through my son's eyes helped me regain the perspective and appreciation that I had when I first started chasing back in 1996. I hope I can retain this perspective in the future.
I was also hoping to take my son to all of my favorite places on the Plains: Major cities/towns such as Colorado Springs, Amarillo (including Cadillac Ranch), Oklahoma City, and Wichita; Great chase regions such as the eastern Colorado Plains, the TX panhandle and down around Lubbock, New Mexico, where the land seems to suddenly change to desert-like scrub brush as soon as you cross the border, and the Sandhills - not great for chasing, but beautiful in its own right; Restaurants, like the Open Range Grill in Ogallala, Abuelo's in Amarillo, the Kincaider brewpub in Broken Bow, NE, Larkspur in Wichita, the Bourbon Street Cafe and Mojo's Blues Club in Bricktown OKC, the Cork and Pig in Odessa, and White House in Odessa. Every year has its own chase route and you never know where you'll end up - one of the joys of chasing - but somehow we were able to get to every one of these places! Having some down days helped, and we probably went out of the way a few times to make sure we hit these spots, but we were fortunate to have the opportunity to get to them. The only one of my favorite regions that we didn't get to chase in, or even go through, was southwestern KS. Having a chance to see Garden of the Gods, blanketed in snow from an overnight snowfall, and smelling the pine in mid-30s temperatures, was a great experience - a new one for me, too, and it felt like we were back at Christmastime... We discovered some new favorite restaurants as well. We hit six states in all: Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska.
Anyway, here's a quick rundown of the 8 chase days - detailed reports have all just recently been posted:
5/23 - Morton tornado - incredible (and ironic) for my son to be able to see a tornado on his very first chase - although, unfortunately, it was fairly distant and we couldn't enjoy it too long without falling behind, and dust obscured the storm for the rest of the chase - but an exciting day with lots of great visuals and intense inflow wind with blowing dust, at times taking visibility to zero.
5/24 - HP in southwestern TX, ultimately got hosed up in traffic and flooding in Midland, bailed on the storm and missed a new meso and tornado on the eastern flank that produced a tornado near Garden City, TX.
5/28 - this is the "lazy man's chase day"; my primary goal was to take my son to Lake McConaughy and the Open Range Grill near Ogallala, hoping for some storms to look at in the late afternoon/evening, which worked out pretty much as planned.
5/29 - targeted near Norfolk; storms went up late, around 7pm, forcing us all the way back to the southwest, near Broken Bow which we had passed through earlier for lunch at the Kincaider... Almost 2.5 hours required to finally get the updraft base in view north of Burwell, right at dark...
5/30 - the "alleged big day"... Blew off the SD/MN target and went for the secondary, dryline play in KS, to no avail... Seemed that every cell died just as we got to it, as we dropped north along the line from Strong City all the day down to Douglass... Not a single tornado report in KS, and I don't think there were even any tornado warnings!
5/31 - played stationary front in the Texas panhandle... Brief supercell structure but storms clustered and we shifted position to other storms north of I-40 in OK, only to get a big HP mess.
6/1 - another day along the stationary front, this time in southeastern NM. Probably one of the better supercells since Morton day. Also experienced several inches of hail accumulation and a hail fog, which was not only new for my son but also something I hadn't seen for years...
6/3 - last chase day, southeastern Colorado, near Kim. Nice HP but missed tornadic storms a little further north near Lamar.
Over 5,200 miles driven, as we went from Denver to southwestern TX, up to Nebraska, all the way back down to southeastern NM, and back home via Denver.
The good news is, my son is hooked, and I hope he will be accompanying me every year from now on. After my daughters graduate high school, hopefully they will be joining me as well!
Having gone back and read my 2021 recap, it turns out this is the second consecutive season that I came back content - not only for the reasons discussed above, but also, like in 2021, I did not make any major mistakes to come home regretting or ruminating over. Sure, I can identify some 2022 mistakes - probably more so than in 2021: Not getting to the Morton storm sooner on 5/23. Being too quick to bail on the 5/24 chase instead of trying harder to get to the eastern flank and the Garden City, TX tornado. Targeting, and staying near, the Route 160 latitude instead of the Route 50 latitude in southeastern CO on the last chase day, 6/2. But none of those are so egregious as to cause me any continuing angst once I got home, and in fact I was glad for my son to also be exposed to those aspects of chasing - the unavoidable second-guessing, disappointment, and seeming randomness.
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