May 25 - May 27th: South Dakota Chase

Saturday, May 25th

Memorial Day Weekend.  Nick and I planned for a Target of west of Pierre, SD. We started out the day early traveling from the Twin Cities arriving for a pit stop final chase target pick in Pierre, SD around 8am.

We headed west of Pierre towards White Owl, and stopped west of Union Center. Along the way we stopped at our favorite spot that looks over a steep hill. It contains prickly pear catcus along side of the road and a spectacular view in all directions.

We then proceeded to head west. We watched as the storm grew and produced many wall clouds to our west. At times the rain shrouded it, but then the wall cloud would appear again. The storm itself had so much rotation in it that the wall cloud seemed to go from the backside of the storm to the front side of the storm.

The picture above shows a nice feeder inflow going into the storm.

 Above is a picture Nick took of me on the phone with the weather service reporting a wall cloud on the storm we are watching. You can see the view of the storm via our radar on the laptop in the car.

We caught this brief needle funnel cloud just to the left of our car while watching the bigger storm to the west. 

 

The storm finally started to move to the south east and we headed back east and then south to reposition ourselves in front of the storm again. Below are some shots when we were sitting near the interstate on a county road.

 

Here we are directly east of the Rapid City NWS Radar site watching the storm move east.

As the sun started to set, the storm lost its energy, so we went east and grabbed the storm and colors of the sky with the setting sun.

A shot of the car with the awesome storm in the background.

What a great way to end the day!

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Sunday, May 26th

We looked at and watch the prediction from the SPC. We knew the big show would be down in Kansas, and later in the afternoon. We were hoping the storms would fire back in the same area as they were the day before, but unfortunately they fired way west in Wyoming.

So we did some "tourist" stops this day instead.

First stop - Wall Drug!

 This train was sitting on the tracks just next to the parking lot for Wall Drug.

From Wall we headed to the entrance of the Badlands. We went in at the Pinnancles Entrance and followed the Badlands Scenic Roadway through the park. Here are a few shots from the day.

A shot of Amanda taking a picture of the landscape.

A shot from the scenic byway drive.

 Wild Antelope running in the park. If you look very closely you can see the baby near one of the adults.

We were treated to a rare sight - Bighorn sheep on the side of the badlands itself. Momma and Baby!

 

 We then left the park and stopped at the Prairie Dog Gift Shop and feeding area along Highway 240.  We bought the prairie dog food from the gift shop (unsalted peanuts) along with a road trip souvenir and chase mascot for SD, and went to feed the Prairie Dogs. I had fun enjoying watching Nick feed the guys. We also were treated to priarie dog babies!

 Prairie Dog Babies in the hole

We then headed east towards Mitchell, SD to spend the night.

Monday, Memorial Day, we headed back home as all the risk was way south of us and out of our reach for the last long weekend chase weekend.