Bust in North Dakota

Chase Recap:

Jari and I didn’t chase in Colorado on the 6th and 7th due to the truck problems and having to drop Jena off at the airport on the morning of the 7th and pick up Sarah that evening.

We hit the road early in the morning on the 8th for Fargo, ND. Unfortunately I woke up with an aching ear and it got nothing but worse as the day progressed. I was in very heavy pain for the whole 14 hour drive, taking pain killers every few hours on the drive up.

Fortunately, I was able to get into an urgent care center first thing Saturday AM and get some antibiotics for my outer and middle ear infection. While I didn’t get immediate relief, I started feeling much better a couple days later when things healed up.

As far as the chase went, it was quite the disappointment. Adam Lucio and I left Fargo and headed to Grand Forks then northwest towards Devils Lake.

We stopped south of the town of Langdon where we waited for quite awhile and pretty much assumed it would bust.

Then late in the day, a storm started developing almost on top of us. We started east after it as it was moving at a pretty good clip. There was no real signs of a good base and we finally got right under where the highest reflections were on radar and realized the storm was pretty elevated and not showing signs of being surface based.

There was some golf ball or bigger sized hail reported out of the storm, and we came across some pretty significant hail in the road, but the storm was hauling off to the northeast faster than I could keep up with it.

We watched as the storm rocketed off into Canada, still not surface based. The TVN guys reported seeing a cone tornado later on, which surprised me, but it’s possible as the storm was definitely in some decent shear.

We continued east and went to Hallock, MN where we watched the next storm go to the north and storms struggle to our south.

Eventually we dropped south and headed back to Fargo, giving up on a potentially decent day.