Day 2: Fire and Ice

So I hear there has been some hail back home today? Hmmmm, we'll see about that!

We started the day in pretty much the perfect spot, so hung around waiting for things to kick off. Around 1400 we decided to head towards Rocksprings, sadly the gods were conspiring against us and we ended up on the side of the road needing to change a tyre. Frustratingly there wasn't anywhere level enough to be able to get the car jacked up high enough to get the wheel off so we were forced to hobble into Rocksprings and find a garage to get the wheel replaced.

By this time we had lost a fair amount of time, but storms were starting to pop up to our south so thats where we headed.  Sadly they weren't particularly organised and pretty messy, so picking a storm to go after was more a case of which ever one we can get in position for rather than what one is looking best! To get to it we punched the core, at this time there was nothing more than very heavy rain. As we got to the south side we quickly encountered some strong and gusty winds which was kicking up a lot of dust which looked like it had some rotation inside it, possibly forming a landspout for a time. We followed this storm for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Further down the road we came pretty close to finding ourselves amongst some hail that was larger than golf balls and would have almost done some pretty serious damage to the car! It was a pretty close call, and we were within a Km of getting smashed, but a decision from Todd to hang back a couple of minutes certainly made the difference between losing the windscreen and keeping everything in one piece!

How close we came to hitting the core berore we stopped, our location circled in blue, and the road is the dark blue line.

Golf ball (and larger) hail.

Hail shredding signs, as well as completely shredding trees and smashing windows.

We ended up following the storm as it moved eastwards, with some reports suggesting the size of the hail increasing upto that of a baseball! The landscape here is very much dominated by oil and gas exploitation, and with the light fading quickly the excess fumes being burnt off just added to the drama of the view. We had set a course to role into the town of Three Rivers just after the storm had passed and try and find some more massive hail stones. However just outside the town (and probably fortunately for the locals) the storm died and produced nothing more than heavy rain and flash flooding, a slightly disappointing way to end another good day!

Radar before it hits Three Rivers, just as it started to die, you can see how it's weakened since the previous radar shot above.