June 2nd was the first day of at least two chasing in NM/TX before I leave on the 6th for Reno, NV for the bowling trip I’m going on. The night before I spent in Wichita partying with my good chaser friends, which was real fun. I left Wichita about 8:15am or so and got back to Dodge around 10:45.. made a quick and dirty forecast, packed a few things and set out around Noon. I made the decision to go ahead and reserve a motel room in Clayton ahead of time… and I arrived in Clayton about the time storms were going up just north of there. I was in touch with Matt Crowther through the afternoon… and his original idea was to head up towards the Clayton area as well — however it ended up that an east-west boundary of towering Cumulus developed farther south in the Plainview-Dimmitt area and Matt stayed down there… while I stayed up around Clayton. A storm north of Clayton looked promising for awhile as it moved due south over Clayton. In time, however, this storm and another immediately east of it began to "line out" and become less interesting. I was then suckered to development farther to the west per radar and visual of a distant large base. Instead of busting south to try and catch the Dimmitt storm (I hate chasing storms that are seemingly moving away from me and from the north), I blasted west in no-man’s-land New Mexico to Mosquero. There were several isolated marginal supercells to my southwest, west southwest, and a couple to my northwest. The storms to my northwest unfortunately shriveled and died, but one of them looked fairly picturesque north of Mosquero — a narrow "chimney" looking updraft with a little bit of a flared base. Storms farther to my southwest showed visual signs of more "mass" to them, however my eyes were now drawn to my distant northeast where a supercell was diving south-southeast out of far SE CO taking aim on Boise City. I could see the tremendous convection near the horizon, sort of masked a little bit by junky storms between me and it.
I backtracked east along #102 to get back to about 30 S Clayton. When I got back to this point at the intersection of 402, I had to make another decision. Storms were developing right on top of me now with photogenic high base to it. I briefly went north (so that I could go east again to vector myself towards the Boise City storm), but quickly reconsidered and headed back south to play with this newly organized storm basically just to my immediate west. This was a good decision as this storm revealed real photogenic updraft structure with a nice separate precipitation shaft to the immediate north of the base. The back lighting was pretty good, although quite harsh… but the golden hues were superb. It made me feel a little better about missing out on the "storm of the day" near Dimmitt, TX. This storm was short-lived though, as I got closer to Nara Visa… at which time it was getting late into the evening. I decided to make one last run for the Boise City storm as it was still holding together at around 8:45pm. I got to Dalhart, TX and headed north with barely enough light left… but by the time I got there, the storm really went downhill quickly. Oh well. After playing with this for a little bit, I headed back to Clayton for the night. Below are a few photos from the day:
Storm #1: ~ 20 miles south of Clayton
Storm #2: ~ 20 miles north of Mosquero, NM
Storm #3: ~ 15 miles northwest of Nara Visa, NM
Storm #3: ~ 15 miles northwest of Nara Visa, NM
Storm #4 (as it died): ~ 15 miles north of Dalhart, TX
