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NW Texas/SW Oklahoma - 05 May 2001
Finally I was able to go and chase some of the storms! I had school and work-related commitments to tend to before so I was happy that the best chase day fell on a Saturday. We left relatively early with Seymour, TX as our destination. The SPC had a moderate risk out that extended just south of there. We only stopped once on our way there and made pretty good time. At 3:00 a tornado watch was issued which we learned from my portable TV (a very nice investment). As we approached Seymour we noticed the midlevel clouds were nearly stationary and the low clouds were racing along with the low-level jet. Kyle said that this was a good sign for it indicated rotation in the atmosphere. We stopped in Seymour for a NowCast and Sonic food (yum!), and then drove back north a little bit to park and watch. We noticed a couple of cells in the distance try to rise, but they were very slow about it. We then headed north to Vernon, and we decided to head on to Altus, for nothing seemed to be happening in the south.
On our way we pulled over and saw one of the Doppler on Wheels parked on the side of the road. Kevin McGrath and Kevin Scharfenberg were manning it and said that there wasn't anything happening within 150 miles. We still had plenty of daylight, and they were heading to Altus too. We followed them, but we got stuck behind two cars who were going about 5-10 mph under the speed limit. We could see a storm brewing over Altus and we didn't want to speed, but we wanted to go as fast as we could. In our attempt to pass these two cars, we saw a little black car off in the distance approaching, and we sped up to clear the cars and get back in our lane. In Dusty's attempt to do this, we realized that the black car was the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, and he nailed us. 10 minutes and $173 later, we were back on the road. Our friends in the other car kept on going and we couldn't raise them on our radios, so we were solo for the rest of the chase.
 At Altus we continued north, and we could see that the storm was building and shaping up nicely. We stopped several times to take pictures, and we saw a nice wall cloud, but it wouldn't drop anything. Along the road north we passed Howie Bluestein and his 9mm radar and his crew. A second storm was building behind the first one, cutting off its inflow, and the wall cloud went away. We raced north and east to beat the second storm but stay behind safely behind the first. We headed east toward Cordell, and as the sun was setting I was worried that it would be too dark to see anything. At Cordell, we could either go north or east, with east being the safest route. We chose east and we had a perfect view of the wallcloud backlit by the orange sky, and right before our eyes a funnel dropped and hit the ground! Our first tornado!!! Of course we stopped and took pictures and watched as it quickly went back into the sky. We continued east trying to see if anything else dropped. Apparently another one formed but we were too far away to see it. We stopped several times to try to get lightning pictures, and re-assured a Bingor policeman that we didn't expect anything to hit their town, and we got back later that night. A very successful chase!
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