From a forecasting standpoint, this was one of the easiest chases ever.  Everything pointed to something rolling southeast out of Colorado toward the western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle.  After we hit the road, the only things we looked at were satellite, surface maps and radar.  In many cases, we were without data and for extended periods, only used our eyes.  From a “butt in the seat” standpoint, this was brutal.  At 806 miles and 19 hours, 18 minutes of single day road time, I was whooped when we rolled back into Okarche.  Poor Ray had another couple hours to get home.  But, it’s always easier when you have a good payoff.

We topped off with fuel at 2:25 pm CDT in Boise City and started north.  Storms were already initiating over the mountains of CO/NM and a clump of persistent convection was just west of Kim, Colorado.

We stopped just north of Kim a little after 5 pm CDT.  There was a large group of chasers and we sat for nearly an hour watching the storms evolve and shoot a bit of lightning:

It’s been my experience that storms in the high plains frequently get organized on their own – usually lazy – schedule.  More often that not, you have to let things percolate awhile instead of the explosions you often see at lower elevations.  So we sat for a bit, watching things organize and enjoying the sporadic cloud to ground lightning strikes:

From a spot about midway between Kim and Pritchett at 6:17 pm CDT:

By 7:08 pm CDT, we had moved back east and south of Pritchett and had a well organized storm to our west:

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A consolidated updraft had built a large amount of volume and was likely producing very large hail.  Once it had reached this stage, mesocyclone formation didn’t take long to get organized.  7:14 pm CDT:

Our first evidence of tornado came at 7:20 pm CDT:

The tornado instantly became mostly wrapped in rain, cutting down on our view, but not to the point it wasn’t obvious what was happening.  For a time it looked like a rather large tornado:

Even though the drone was 13 miles away, it was the first time I caught a tornado with it.  I wasn’t looking for a tornado when I launched it, I was hoping to see what kind of supercell structure I could capture.  The tornado decided to play rather quickly while it was up:

The tornado became more and more wrapped in rain and dissipated in there somewhere probably around 7:29 pm CDT.  We had some difficult road options to deal with and ended up working our way back to just north of the Colorado border / northeast of Kenton by 751 pm CDT:

8:13 pm CDT from five miles east of Kenton:

The storm stayed pretty through the remainder of the daylight hours, but tornado production was likely limited to the one event south of Andrix, Colorado.  Some are calling it the Kim tornado – some, Campo – a few, Utleyville.  But it was closest to the now non-existent town of Andrix.  You can still see evidence of where the town was on Highway 160 between Kim and Utleyville.