May 27, 2001 SW Kansas

Started the day in Amarillo TX, in a moderate risk. Steve, Jon, Walker, some more friends and I, stayed the night in thee nicest chase motel to date...lol. Camelot(spelling?). Not only was my room lacking toliet paper, but it was also lacking a place to hang it. Ah but it was cheap. $26 per night comes in handy when gas is around $1.85 per gallon.
We glanced at a bit of data via Walkers laptop and headed towards far sw Kansas. Storms fired in nw Kansas very early(around noon I think) and we held back and waited for new development along the warmfront closer to the developing low in se Colorado. This was a nw flow event big time. Warm front was situated nw-se. Not long after getting into KS a evere watch was issued. That was a little disheartening but it was going to turn out to be quite the ride. We get more data from a motel's telephone line and then wait some more. Finally we say screw waiting for some of the dryline action, lets go north and play with the stuff that is just going up along the warm front. There were about 4 individual supercells inbedded in this forming line.
We decided to try and head north to an e-w highway to move westward. We raced north and just get to the e-w highway in time, then fly west. We had hopes of getting further west and catching something not so outflow dominated and more isolated.
Not long into the journey to the west it became very evident on how quickly this storm was moving. This storm meant business. You can just barely make out the stacked plates in these pics.
The drive west was amazing. This thing looked very hungry for chasers. It was breaking telephone poles north of us at this time.
I'm very thankful this is one of the rare times I decided to use my tri-pod(too bad the horizon is tilted so much....doh).
Our small group watched it approach, on the order of.......well real damn fast.
Cloud motions were crazy to say the least.
The leading edge was curling back and making for quite the impressive sight, while dust was getting kicked up.
We watched areas of dust getting blown up and outward while it moved in. You can hear Steve on video giggling, "Slowly backing towards the car". It's at this moment I start unlatching my camera from the tri-pod, getting ready to RUN!!!!
Running.
Steve and Jon deciding, well it's time to go.
This is lot more enjoyable to watch on video. Stills never do justice to things in motion.
I decided that since it looked like the outflow from hell was going to cut everything off I might as well sit through it. Not long into deciding to stay, I asked myself, "What in the hell are you thinking". I'm pretty clueless as to these gusts, but I'm proud of that little stop sign. I would guess gusts of 60 mph might be about right in this round.
The thought of large hail made me move onward. I headed west to highway 25, south of Lydia and turned southward.
This was a fairly intense leading edge of a gust with many multi-vortex gustnadoes.
I drive about 1 mile south and decide since precip looked to be moving to my east that I'd stick around. I pull over and shoot video back to the north.
I zoom in a bit to see the full darkness heading my way.
This truck driver was unloading something and appeared to be in a bit of a hurry. I think he was scared of the big wall of dust.
On video you can see him scurry around the truck and jet on out of there. Little too late but he was on the road.
It was at this point I knew that I was stupid. I said the heck with this and "tried" to get out of there. I only got back onto the road and that was it. Not being able to see crap in those conditions sparks a bit of fear, even though you know it will go away. It was fun.
This wind really did not want to let up.
I'm not certain what this was, but it was hauling. Looked like some sort of tin.  It had no downward movement at all. It was about 15-20 foot off the ground and soaring. I didn't notice it until watching the video. Shortly after this is when I expereinced the strongest winds, not only of the day, but that I've ever witnessed. I'm certain somewhere between me and that field to the east there were gust near, if not exeeding, 100mph. The DOW(Doppler on Wheels) truck measured 100mph to the se of here. I know of another chaser that measured 106mph south of here quite a ways. Numerous poles were reportred blown down to my north. Part of someone's roof was blown off to my sw. There were many meausered gusts of 80-100mph with this growing complex of storms.
I need to do some more captures because directly behind that flying object is the rotating updraft. This was all major rfd action on the western side of this supercell.
You can sort of see the updraft in this pic.
The whole area to the right of this notch(rfd) is getting hammered with high winds.
View looking south. This was awesome. The low level clouds were trying to push back north as this dust was racing south.
This cop must have been going to the area just to the north, where numerous poles were reported being down. I'm a bit suprised that none of these poles went down. Had they been running e-w instead of n-s I think there would have been a different outcome for them. Notice the truck on the right shoulder facing north toward me. I think that is where he stopped after not being able to see the road.
View looking west.
This is generally the same area 30 minutes after all this started. I noticed some other areas of outflow to the east gusting out to the sw. Notice the whitish clouds above the blowing dust. Right above those cold scud clouds is the shelf from the storm to the east. The air was very cold in this area now....very cold.
I tried shooting damage video but kept missing most of it as I was driving east. Some irrigation pivots were over turned. The metal from this building was about a 1/4 mile south. Some wires between phone poles were broke.
This gas station has seen better days. After paying $200 in gas in less than 2 days I don't feel too bad for it.