May 08, 2021  
My son Ryan and I took a trip out to Central Kansas for a Saturday attempt at finding a tornadic storm.  Left Friday evening and spent the night at our chase partner, Brian Stertz's place.  Got up early and the three of us made our way out toward our target in Central Kansas.  Knowing the storms would not be firing until late afternoon, it gave us plenty of time to make a wildlife side trip.  We spent several hours taking in the sights and photographing a lot wildlife in the Cheyenne Bottoms National Wildlife Refuge.

By mid-afternoon, we stopped for a relaxing lunch at the Pizza Hut in Hoisington, Kansas.  After lunch, we were back on the road and pulled into La Crosse, Kansas to wait for storm initiation.  The thoughts were storms would fire southwest of us and move toward us. 

As we watched radar and kept an eye on current data, we eventually decided to re-position northward up in Hays, Kansas.  As clouds began to build, we moved back southward to maximize our position.  Storms began to fire and one of the cells became the dominant cell, went severe warned, and took on some interesting characteristics between Hays and La Crosse.  We positioned to intercept.
A biy llll

We maneuvered around the storm doing our best to avoid the chaser convergence the best we could as the storm grew. 






The storm maintained its severe warning for hail and wind for the next couple hours, but was unable to wrap up a tornado.  The only severe weather we encountered was on Interstate 70 east of Chapman, Kansas when we drove through quarter size hail.  We continued to keep the storm in our view as we moved eastward with the storm until darkness started setting in.


As the sun set below the horizon and darkness set in, we pulled into a gas station on the southern side of Salina, Kansas to let the storm over take us. We took cover as the storm approached hoping to see some of the larger hail that was reported in the storm.







The storm produced a bunch of pea size hail with an occasional nickel size hail falling, but the most prevalent feature of the storm was the tremendous amount of cloud to ground lightning bolts.





After watching the storm go by, we began our trek back toward Brian's place for the night.  The storms had grown into an MCS with a massive amount of rain behind the line.  In the darkness, there were a few attempts at tornadoes as a few Tornado Warnings were issued, but nothing was ever confirmed.

44 Hours - 1211 Miles

Click on the link below to see video of some of these storms.