Left Denver at noon headed for southeast Colorado where more sunshine and a boundary were present. By the time I reached Limon, I already saw thunderstorms explode to my south. So I blasted quickly south on 287 and by the time I got to Eads, the first TOR was issued. All I could see was this electrified wall of white in front of me and of course knew what it meant. I hit the core at 2:55 PM north of Wiley and was greeted with tennis ball sized hail on my already cracked windshield. So I pushed through it. South of it, just north of Wiley, I saw a large slowly rotating wall cloud, perfectly bowl shaped. At about 3:15 PM I could see a rotating dust bowl under it. Not a great dust bowl but I would call it a tornado. It persisted for about 5 minutes.

Then south I went cutting through dirt roads (dry) to get back southeast of the updraft. The updraft was a highly striated updraft at least 10 miles across with a VERY LARGE laminar beaver tail streaming in from the southeast. I made it just southwest of Lamar when I noticed an occlusion taking place and strong wet RFD winds wrapping around the occluded meso. Soon a white cone tornado formed. The debris cloud was entirely of dark brown dirt. It stayed on the ground for about 6 minutes before it dissipated. Then I made it to 287 and zig zigged east/southeast to stay in front of the meso and be able to look down the notch of this now HP storm. A landspout formed to my west, about 10 miles northwest of Twin Buttes and persisted for 17 minutes. The storm continued to march south/southeast, slowly and became an electrified monster!! I called off the dogs and went back through the core to get to 287 again and headed north to get back home.

That is when all things came to a stand still. I passed a bridge where water was flowing up to the bottom and a person’s house was flooded about 4 ft deep. I figured I could make it back to Lamar (only 7 miles), but the road was closed due to flash flooding in front of me. I sat there for 3 hours blocked in front and back by flooding. Hail was piled up at least 6″ deep across the fields.

2002, August 2002, Colorado, hail, supercell, tornado