Today was fun. Woke up late but was well rested after finally getting 12 hours of sleep to chase an amazing storm in Richland County, ND.
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Drove up to Richland County, ND and saw two amazing storms. The first storm put down a bunch of golf ball sized hail and made the roads look like it just snowed. That storm weakened and moved off to the southeast and into western Minnesota to become a mega hail storm but never was tornado warned. I bailed on as it moved southeast of Wyndmere, ND.
I drove north for about 10 miles to the north on highway 18 and intercepted the next storm that was weakening but I had a feeling that it would regenerate and come back to life. Boy did it ever come back to life as it rode the boundary to the east south east.
On highway 18, once again I met up with Riley, who I met a few weeks ago near Benson, MN. This time he had his girlfriend with him. We chatted for a while and kept on chasing until we got on Interstate 29 and then he fell behind. Was cool to see him and finally connect on Crackbook with him. I was wondering what happened to him as I pulled off at the next exit waiting for them but turns out they had some car trouble and had to call off the chase.
As I kept on chasing after waiting a few minutes for Riley to catch up, I drove down Interstate 29 and knew the Red River would be an issue so I opted to head east on 11 towards Fairmount, ND. I saw some chasers parked on the bridge over the interstate that almost became “Road Kill” by several vehicles. If you are going to pull over to watch the storm, don’t do it in the lanes of traffic or on a restricted bridge with a lot of traffic. Another SUV today was parked half way on the road in the lanes of traffic to take photos when there was plenty of space to pull off to the side of the road or in some driveway or farm field entrance. Every year the dumb ass parking on the road gets worse up here.
Here is the video, time to get some much needed sleep.