77 Deer Trail LP Supercell 26 May 2010

Date: 26 May 2010

Location: Eastern, CO - Denver International Airport to Prospect Valley to Deer Trail, CO.

Chaser Partner: Tami Griffin

Summary: While waiting for Tami to get done with work a storm fired up north of Denver. As it tracked toward DIA I noticed Verne Carlson had his cam on so I started watching his stream. As his stream popped up on my screen he had a gorgeous rotating wall cloud up close and personal. I blazed out the door and headed toward DIA to intercept. Tami had to finish so I was out solo. I didn't make it 20 minutes down the road and she was in hot pursuit trying to catch me. I stopped at Jewel and waited for her and spied the storm as I had a great position to watch. We chased that all the way to Prospect Valley stopping along the way for possible photo ops. At one point the inflow band was literally on the ground and was being reported as a funnel/tornado. Take your Skywarn classes and pay attention folks that thought that there was anything resembling a tornado. There was ZERO rotation with this feature. Looked cool though. Anyway, we chased this with the hoards all the way to Prospect Valley. V2 was all over the place as well. This storm just never really got its act together. It did however put down MASSIVE amounts of hail north of I-76. We encountered some nickel sized hail at the Prospect Valley FD. Another storm popped up in Elbert County and tracked toward Deer Trail. Tami and I finally got her car to someplace where it would be easy to get back to after the chase and then we headed down to Deer Trail to intercept. We hooked up with Eric Hurst and Travis Speakman and watched a beauteous LP TOR warned supercell for about 30 minutes. As soon as it crossed I-70 it pretty much died. We pretty much called it a day after that. Shot some time lapse video near Byers of storms coming off the front range and then hooked up with Joe Spencer and his wife for dinner at Chili's. Good day all in all.

Wall cloud east of DIA.

Storm coming out of Elbert County later that evening.

LP Supercell just west of Deer Trail.

Crossing I-70.