I made numerous trips to the Chicago area to see my mom. I usually flew, either because I lacked extra time or I just couldn’t deal with the boredom of interstate driving in the Midwest. In March, 2009 I drove there. Paula Dyman was in an assisted-living facility in St. Charles, Illinois, and I was the primary caregiver. I traveled to Illinois every few months to visit, take her to medical appointments, and to manage her affairs.
It was a sunny morning in mid March and the snow had long since melted on the Taos plateau. Spring-like conditions prevailed. A strong westerly breeze and a forecast for improving conditions were expected. East of the mountains in western Kansas, and in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, a developing weather system was forecast to spawn severe thunderstorms and possible tornadoes. If I had been mentally competent, I would have hiked in the mountains or desert near Taos that day and flown to Chicago the next, but I’m fascinated by violent weather, always looking for an opportunity to see a funnel cloud or tornado, some hail and atmospheric turbulence, an ideal setup for a foul weather junkie.
My planned route would take me east over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Cimarron Range via US-64 to Raton, New Mexico, then into the Dry Cimarron River valley via routes 72 and 456 into the Oklahoma Panhandle, a lonely drive past the Folsom Man archeological site, along a gravel road through red and brown hues of a Mesozoic diorama. My first day’s goal was Meade State Park in southwest Kansas, about 75 miles east of the New Mexico state line. I usually camped when driving to Illinois, always on the lookout for out-of-the-way state parks and monuments along empty blue highways far from large towns and cities.
I was packed and ready to go, allowing four days for the one-way trek, a distance of about 1,200 miles, a road trip that could be easily accomplished in two days via interstate routes. My final check of the weather indicated a dry line in eastern New Mexico, increasing the likelihood of violent weather. A dry line is a meteorological boundary separating different air masses along which severe thunderstorms are most likely to develop. My plan was to cross this boundary, see some remote parts of northeastern New Mexico and far western Oklahoma, and then head into southwestern Kansas and Meade State Park. I had never been there and wanted to enjoy high plains places, new panoramas, and maybe some atmospheric drama.
The sky was clear and the air warm and breezy as I drove through the Sangre de Cristo and Cimarron Ranges, still west of the dry line, but massive cumulous clouds started building east of Folsom as I entered the Dry Cimarron valley. Cumulous clouds billowed up like giant mushrooms, gaining a thousand feet a minute, blanketing the southern sky. I was in for a good show. I stopped about 15 miles east of Folsom on an old river terrace and starred upward, fascinated by the swiftness of the developing scene.
I’ve had a long career witnessing violent weather, a few close calls, some embarrassing recollections, but mostly fun times. I’m not thinking of winter weather here. I can recall some memorable blizzards, but I’m especially enamored by spring weather patterns when I’m outdoors monitoring developing storms, turbulent clouds, a light and sound show, and experiencing the exhilaration of being close to Mother Nature, wondering excitedly what she will throw my way. As a grade schooler, I was an amateur meteorologist and kept records of temperature, pressure, and precipitation. I read about weather prediction and was given a junior weather science kit one Christmas. Forecasting was less precise than today, before satellites, Doppler radar, and sophisticated computer modeling.
I had a fear of lightning as a child and remember the second floor bedroom I shared with my brother, Tom, during a few nights when storms developed. When it takes less than a second for the crack of thunder after a blinding flash, the distance from the electrical charge to my ears was much less than a thousand feet. The wire extending from our lightning rod to the ground beneath our house passed right over our bedroom ceiling. We were right below the television antenna anchored to the roof and stretching about 20 feet into the air above the cornice.
It was all pretty exciting. I recall one storm as a child that may have produced a tornado, or at least some strong wind shear. Our family hopped into the Chevy afterward and drove through town (along with hundreds of other residents) gawking at the downed trees along the streets. Violent storms were always common in northern Illinois and the threat of damaging spring time tornadoes was always lurking in the background. The town of Plano, Illinois, about 40 miles south of Geneva always seemed to have more than its share of violent storms. Locals called it tornado alley. I always wondered if there was a relationship between violent weather and local geography.
A tornado destroyed part of Crystal lake, Illinois in April, 1965. Crystal Lake is about 30 miles north of Geneva and was directly in the path of the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak on April 11th. The widespread storm event spawned 47 tornadoes in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio and killed 271 people. At the time, it was the deadliest outbreak in the region, killing 137 people in Indiana alone. This was scary stuff. My friend, Randy, was from Crystal Lake. We were in school a thousand miles away in Rapid City, South Dakota, and heard about the storm on the news. Randy’s parents were lucky. Their home only suffered minor damage, but that storm left a lasting impression on me, and I wasn’t even there.
After graduating from college, I worked as a bartender for my Aunt Stacy in Geneva. The Club Moderne was east of town in the country, outside the city limit where one could drink until 2 am. I worked for her on the weekends and helped with the midnight spillover from local in-town bars. I can recall one Saturday night thunderstorm that seemed severe even with the loud juke box music in the Club. The lights may have gone out for a short time. Stacy delayed leaving the club because of the storm. When I saw her the next day, she described the damage to her bedroom, severe burn marks on the pillows and sheets, indicating the path of the electric current. Her house was hit by lightning prior to her return. We both imagined what would have happened if she were in bed during that strike.
I’ve had an enviable career in geology, doing fieldwork in the great outdoors, the mountains and deserts of the American West, a storm prone region capable of producing summer thunderstorms with high winds, hail, heavy rain, and occasional tornadoes. During drought years in our western deserts, dry thunderstorms are a common occurrence. These storms produce lightning and gusty winds but little or no rain. Windblown dust forms clouds near the ground and mixes with occasional rain drops to form airborne mud drops. I drove through one such storm near Shoshone, Wyoming in the 1980s on my way to Montana. The wind gusted, and dust flew into the air and mixed with rain drops. My Ford Bronco was soon splattered with reddish brown mud. I turned on my wipers and smeared a coat of mud over my windshield as frequent lightning flashes streaked across the sky. Fortunately, a liberal application of windshield fluid saved the day!
I experienced mud again a few years later in central Montana near Winnett. The forecast was for thunderstorms with locally heavy rain. I was with colleagues on a dusty clay track several miles from town as we passed a sign that read Road impassable when wet. Wet expandable clays add water to their molecular structure making them extremely slippery, a condition worse that driving on ice. Cretaceous rocks often contain clay-rich shale horizons formed by the weathering of volcanic rocks. A geologist many years ago coined the term popcorn texture for shale beds containing the clay mineral montmorillonite. Continuous wetting and drying results in a puffy, crackly texture resembling popped corn. When dry, the popcorn expands, and walking on a clay surface is easy, but when wet, the surface is extremely slippery and movement is virtually impossible.
A tiny cumulous puff over the Big Snowy Mountains first appeared about noon during our lunch break, but soon metastasized into a massive cell. We continued to work as it developed, but we carefully calibrated our distance to the nearest paved road based on the speed of the approaching storm. At the last possible moment we finished measuring a section of Thermopolis Shale, jumped into our 4 X 4, and headed out of the area. We miscalculated our departure as hail and heavy rain pelted our vehicle. Apparently, the storm had suddenly expanded, or a secondary cell developed. We accelerated and maintained traction until we reached asphalt several minutes later. The downpour continued for an hour as we headed back to Winnett. We were lucky that day.
Once in the 1990s, Karen Porter and I were visiting a road cut of Mowry Shale along I-90 east of Bozeman, Montana. The outcrop was a steep slope, maybe 45 degrees, along the north side of the highway. It rained on us, and only 10 minutes of it made the slopes extremely slippery. Surprisingly, we didn’t fall into the mud, but our boots were unrecognizable when we reached the vehicle.
My most knuckle-biting mud experience behind the wheel occurred in the Blacktail Range southeast of Dillon, Montana at the end of a long work day when a severe thunderstorm suddenly appeared. I was with Karen and Bill Cobban. We were looking for the base of the Cretaceous Blackleaf Formation. We had been driving on a dirt track, dry and hard that morning, and I assumed that even a wet surface would be passable, a wrong assumption. Clouds developed by midday, darkening to an ominous mass by mid afternoon. When the rain started we decided to leave. The rain intensified and we noticed quarter-sized hail pelting our vehicle. Lots of lightning and some wind gusts as the road softened and our heavy duty tires lost traction. The vehicle bogged down (even in four-wheel drive) on the trackway, the tires spinning uselessly as we sunk into the wet clay. We were stuck in the middle of the road, in the middle of a storm, anticipating a cold night in the Blacktail Range. A heavy duty utility truck from the rural electric association soon pulled up behind us, the kind of truck with double rear tires and a thousand pounds of welding equipment on the bed. A friendly guy edged around our rig, pulled out a tow chain, and approached us. We got out and helped hook up the chain in the driving rain. He ever so slowly inched forward, pulling the chain taught, his tires digging deep into the saturated road bed. Then, faster and faster. It seemed very fast since I was driving, and we were sliding sideways back and forth, slipping transverse to the road with mud and gravel showering the windshield. We were towed three or four miles but gained traction as the road bed stabilized. The rain also slowed in intensity and we stopped. The ordeal was over. We unhitched the chain, thanked our Good Samaritan profusely, and asked if he was a beer drinker and where he was staying. Later that evening after leaving the car wash, we deposited a case of beer outside his room at the Best Western in Dillon.
After that incident, I carried a tow chain, a come-along jack, and several short lengths of 2 X 6 boards for that inevitable weather experience. For several years, one of my field localities south of Lima Peaks, just off the Snowline exit on I-15 was a challenge to access. Gravel roads were nonexistent. Dirt tracks leading into the grazing range offered access to our area. The route was primarily on the property of a local cattle grazing association, and access was a stressful drive of six or more miles requiring an hour. Our location was a square mile area south of the peaks, and access routes were often covered in a veneer of slippery clay, locally referred to as the paint pots. The route was just a dirt track or several tracks, used by local cowboys in their trucks or on horseback to reach their cows. The outcrops were important to me because they represented the only continuous exposures of Blackleaf Formation for miles around, and I needed to visit them frequently. I was often there all day, either alone or with colleagues, briefly stopping by the grazing association early in the morning to inform the manager of our intentions. They were friendly, always cooperative. The chief cowboy was a tall guy fitting for a Marlboro commercial. In fact, local rumor had it that he was a stand in for the Marlboro Man. I was definitely impressed, despite the fact that I had broken my nicotine habit years earlier.
The route passed through sage-infested, clayey beds of the Kootenai and Blackleaf Formations, then descended into steep drainages, the worst of which was Deep Creek, a spring fed runoff that flowed from the terrane at the east end of the Lima Peaks only about a mile from our exposures. Deep Creek was shallow, but it formed a 500-ft wide valley that cut into the underlying Kootenai Formation descending more than 150 feet from the adjoining pediment, a remnant of the last ice age. Clay-rich beds of the Kootenai on the short route into or out of the valley were treacherous when wet. The route was a deeply incised track created by hapless trucks during wet weather. I was always fearful of an afternoon storm, an inch of rain or some hail on the water-absorbent clay. I kept an eye on the sky and was always ready to make a quick escape when clouds threatened. The paved highway was at least an hour away, and the tortuous route could create a calamity. On more than one occasion I descended into Deep Creek on wet clay, totally out of control, simply hoping to reach bottom without sliding out of the rutted track sideways into the valley below.
Sometime in the early 1990s, Shell Oil drilled an exploratory well nearby, a deep and expensive wildcat to test one of the thrust plates underlying Cretaceous rocks. Shell arranged with the Forest Service to improve access and built (at Shell’s expense) a narrow but solid gravel road south of Lima Peaks into the upper Sawmill Creek drainage bypassing the grazing association quagmire and shortening my route by two or three miles. The crew even used gravel from one of the nearby conglomerate beds to build the road. It was a cause for celebration, such a relaxed drive to the paint pots on a road built with Cretaceous gravel.
I was in my early 30s in the late 1970s, unmarried, and working for the U.S. Geological Survey. I devised a plan to meet women by teaching a short course in geology at the Boulder Free School, a non-profit institution for adult education in the local community. I had already taken a class there, The Rhetoric of Bob Dylan, from a bearded Boulderite who saw significant meaning in Bob’s lyrics. The class included mostly women in their 20s and 30s. I immediately realized that the opportunities here were endless, a vast reservoir of female students. I gave this some thought and designed my own class, settling on Boulder Mountain Geology, a laidback six-session classroom-based program with labs and lectures, and a final Saturday fieldtrip in the Boulder foothills followed by beer and pizza at one of Boulders best. My little venue looked good, so I submitted it to the BFS board as a tuition free class. They approved it immediately.
The class included basic geologic principles, rocks and minerals, plate tectonics and structures, landforms, deep time, and of course poetic geology. My motivation was partly social, but I always wanted to share my geologic knowledge with others. I enjoyed teaching and the intellectual and social results were satisfying. I probably taught it six or seven times. You might be wondering now when weather and storms will figure into this story. The occasion was a Saturday morning fieldtrip to Rocky Mountain National Park, a one-hour drive northwest of Boulder. We were in pursuit of alpine glacial features—moraines, rock glaciers, and parabolic valleys. The participants that day and the trip details are fuzzy after 40 years, but a single image is still clear in my mind. We parked several cars at the end of Bear Creek Road next to a trailhead. Our plan was to hike a few miles and look at glacial striations and moraines. There were about 15 of us, bunched up in a group, standing next to the hood of a vehicle as I held forth over a large map. I had noticed a darkening sky, but thought we had a couple of hours to complete this leg of the trip. We had no warning, no buzzing, no static electricity, just the flash-bang, or maybe a flash-crash, and the sudden realization that we were nearly killed. The smell of ozone was immediate, a pungent metallic-like odor formed by the intense electrical charge in the atmosphere, a clear indicator of nearby lightning. We jumped into the cars and headed for the next stop, a much more meteorologically safe venue. I’ve seen photos and heard stories of lightning strikes decimating elk herds, cattle, farmers, golfers, or sheep trying to weather a thunderstorm.
Another personal, electrifying—and frightening—experience comes to mind. I was with a small group of mountain hikers attempting to reach the summit of Mt. Yale in central Colorado’s Collegiate Range one summer in the late 1980’s. Mt. Yale is a 14er, meaning that it is one of Colorado’s premier climbs reaching up more than 14,000 feet. It’s not a technical climb but simply an endurance trek to get to the top and back down alive. It was exhausting work, the primary reason I climbed so few of them. We were within 500 feet of the summit, scrambling up scree slopes about 2,500 feet above the tree line fully exposed to the sky. Clouds were building but a storm did not seem imminent as we trudged on hoping to reach the summit before one developed. There was no rain in the vicinity. I suddenly noticed the hair on my arm standing up and looked at my friends. Tom looked at me and pointed to my head. We were in a strong static electrical field and immediately came to the same decision—we were down and into the trees within 20 minutes, a rapid descent into an area of relative safety. At about that time we heard the first of several thunder cracks in the distance. I’ve talked to colleagues and friends who’ve experienced the same kind of static charge but with a buzzing or crackling sound.
Some life threatening storms are amusing, even hilariously funny, in retrospect. Gary Webster and I met at least once a summer to do some fly fishing and geologic fieldwork together. Gary was my graduate advisor at Washington State University in the 1980s. We became good friends and helped each other in the field after I graduated, especially if heavy lifting was required or if safety was a concern. Gary collected limestones, fossiliferous ones containing crinoids, small Paleozoic echinoderms (like starfish) inhabiting marine substrates. Well preserved crinoid calyces are rare and valuable to collectors and scientists. Their occurrence is directly associated with long steep climbs to the tops of mountains. I was interested in Cretaceous conglomerate clasts and slabs of gray sandstone usually located near major highways within easy walking distance from a vehicle or trout stream.
Gary and I had met once in the late 1980s along the Ruby River south of Sheridan, in southwest Montana, a 25-mile slog on gravel roads to find a suitable campsite. The upper Ruby drainage was a great habitat for Brook trout and the bag limit was generous. The valley is floored by thousands of feet of easily erodible mudstones of the Frontier Formation. Millions of tons of rock have been dislodged, broken down, and transported downstream by spring melt waters and summer downpours at an astonishing rate during the last million years. The mountaintops west of the river were comprised of fossiliferous Paleozoic limestones.
It was one of those clear, crisp summer mornings at 7,000 feet, a cloudless deep blue sky, dry cool air and a moderate breeze, the promise of a good day of collecting. Our plan was to climb Stonehouse Mountain, a broad knob towering up to 10,000 feet at the northern end of the Snowcrest Range, a few miles west of the Ruby River. Gary’s outcroppings were exposed at and near the summit, Mississippian-aged crinoid-bearing limestones of the Madison Group. Our 3,000-foot climb started out well, beginning at the end of a logging road just a few miles from our campsite along the river. We shouldered full day packs for a long hike, up and up for at least 3 hours, switch backing on steep grassy slopes and climbing over deadfall in pine-spruce groves on the southeast side of the mountain. It’s hard work climbing mountains without a designated trail. The weather was cooperating as we closed in on our target. We could now clearly see the approaching gray rocks in the distance. As we continued to climb, the entire upper Ruby valley opened up to us, a spectacular site with the Madison Range on the far eastern horizon, and Black Butte, a Tertiary volcanic plug in the foreground along the crest of the Gravelly Range. Stonehouse was getting close now, a craggy treeless summit with prominent ridges and knobs luring us to our goal.
We didn’t see the storm until we were near the top, a towering dark-gray mass southwest of the mountain. The leading edge was about 5 miles from us, maybe 15 minutes away at the most and moving in our direction. We reached the summit and surveyed the landscape. The storm encompassed many square miles, dark opaque bands of rain and hail with frequent flashes of lightning in the foreground. We had little time to look for crinoids before the storm hit. We attacked the nearest limestone ridge and spent 10 minutes rushing about, looking for fossils and taking a few samples along the way. As lightning flashes approached us, we sprinted down hill retracing our earlier route along the exposed east flank of the summit, soon stopping at a grass- and sage-covered meadow, still above the tree line, donning ponchos, and sprawling on a grassy mat to meet our fate. The storm was travelling fast and descended on us quickly. We were struck first by stinging quarter-sized hail that quickly formed a snowy white veneer over us, then a heavy noisy downpour with frequent lightning flashes. During the height of the storm, I lifted my head slightly and peaked through the sage to look downhill into the Ruby valley. Instantly, a flash streaked, first down and then across part of the valley 2,000 feet below us. Not an uplifting sight.
The rain slowed to a steady drizzle after 15 minutes as the hail, rain, and thunder headed east. I stood and surveyed the landscape with some relief but felt wet considering I had an adequate plastic poncho covering my body. I saw Gary about 20 feet away, gazing at me and laughing almost uncontrollably. He could always sing a humorous note during an otherwise serious tune, but I wondered why he was laughing when we were lucky to be alive. He was pointing to me for some reason. I suddenly looked down at my poncho, realized what had happened, and started laughing too. My poncho was thoroughly perforated from the impact of hail stones, a shredded mass of green plastic. The impact of quarter-sized hail stones had ripped the thin plastic sheet in a hundred places. I looked pretty silly standing in the wet sage decked out in that outfit, knowing full well that Gary Webster would never let me live that one down!
I’ve accumulated a lot of storm stories from friends and colleagues, tales of danger, fear, and awe. I wasn’t there at the time but I sure wanted to be there—maybe. Jenni and I were visiting friends in Ardmore, Oklahoma in 2009, Ken and Cleo Chaffin, who for many years had owned a small town newspaper in nearby Healdton. They were journalists and good storytellers, Ken especially lent a casual air to any yarn. Jenni and I stopped to visit them on a return trip from Galveston, Texas and a Caribbean cruise that May. We were apprehensive about travelling through Oklahoma in the spring, the most notorious season in the southern Midcontinent for damaging storms. We were driving Jenni’s Passat and didn’t want to suffer hail damage. Our visit to see the Chaffins came three months after a deadly tornado struck the nearby village of Lone Grove that February during a severe outbreak. That storm made the national news not only because of the loss of life, but because of its severity and resulting damage. It was classed as an EF-4 category twister on the Enhanced Fujita scale.
Ken and Cleo are great at entertaining their guests. When we arrived, Ken offered to take us on a tornado tour of the Lone Grove area to show us the damage caused by that twister. I jumped with enthusiasm at the idea especially after Ken suggested we eat catfish, hushpuppies, and okra at Bill’s Catfish House nearby before the tour. The tornado developed from a super cell that formed in north Texas that afternoon and touched down as the storm crossed the Red River. It struck Lone Grove about 7:30 pm on February 10th causing extensive damage and killing eight people. As I was eating a hushpuppy and trying not to stare at the obese folks in a booth nearby (eating the same), Ken said that the twister just missed Bill’s. It passed near the Lone Grove post office where an unfortunate local resident was swept into the maelstrom while trying to escape through a front door. We got into the Chaffin’s car and drove northeast on county roads to assess further damage. As Ken described the early Spring scene, I could see trees still stripped of leaves, broken branches, and much debris. After three months, many of the homes in the path of the storm had actually been rebuilt, brand new ranch style homes surrounded by crumpled trees. The tornado track was easy to follow because the surrounding area was mostly forested, full of oaks, maples, and elms.
Ken pointed out the approximate location the twister intensified from an EF-3 to an EF-4 event. Here, the width increased to more than a half mile, the rotational velocity surpassed 160 mph. Trees here appeared even more crumpled. Fortunately, most homeowners along the path had storm shelters and radio responders since locals were at home that evening, and everyone expected the worst. We continued our somber route northeast for a few miles and crossed I-35 at Prairie Valley Road where several vehicles had been lifted off the ground and overturned. A truck driver was killed nearby.
Jenni grew up in Oklahoma and remembers warnings of storms in Oklahoma City as a child. She returned there in May, 2010 during a period of intense storm activity. Fifty-six twisters were reported during the Moore, Oklahoma outbreak that week. She phoned me one evening after the hotel manager had knocked and said that a tornado was on the ground nearby. I quickly logged into Weather.com and checked the Doplar radar map for her area. It indicated that the cell was farther south near the southern part of the metro area, close to Moore. She was relieved that it would bypass her location in the northern part of Oklahoma City.
I recently met Karen Porter and two of her friends at Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park, a stone’s throw east of LaHood, Montana. The park is in an picturesque setting, nestled in the valley of the Jefferson River, bordered by the London Hills and Elkhorn Mountains, and along an old Milwaukee Road rail route. Karen, Jamie, and Cindy had rented a small cabin in the campground to participate in an evening fieldtrip to identify owls in the park. I tagged along, but had other reasons to see Karen. She was an old friend and colleague, and we shared a lot of memories working in the field over the years. Karen told me she had once seen St Elmo’s Fire. No fire to be sure, but an electrical plasma, ionized atmosphere like a fluorescent light glowing blue from the charged oxygen and nitrogen molecules. I was fascinated by the phenomenon and wanted to ask her about the experience because I had never witnessed it. I had read sailors stories of “glowing flames” on the mastheads of sailing ships and wanted to know more. Karen was happy to oblige. We all sat around that evening to hear her story.
She had been working in the Missouri Breaks region in central Montana in the early 1990s. She was part of a team compiling a new state geologic map. It had been an especially stormy summer and she was having difficulty trying to meet her work schedule—muddy roads, heavy rain, and of course lightning. She described sitting out a thunderstorm one evening, heavy rain and wind, lots of lightning flashes and thunder, and some hail. She was parked near a gravel road on a grassy terrace above the Judith River at dusk waiting out the storm. Suddenly, a blue incandescent ball of light appeared on her truck. It formed slowly just above the center of the hood only three or four feet in front of her, and maybe a foot in diameter. The blue ball was stationary and contained red-orange veins or lenses of light. She was more awestruck than scared and guessed that it lasted for a minute as the rain and hail continued to pound her truck. It then slowly dissipated into the darkness.
We all agreed that she had seen a rare event, an opportunity of a lifetime, safe (and grounded) in the closed environment of her pickup truck. Bill Cobban found that out many years ago according to his telling. When near Albuquerque he and three colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey were riding in their Ford Bronco when they were hit by lightning. Luckily the windows were closed due to heavy rain. Bill told me the story years later as we were enveloped in another storm somewhere in Montana. Bill was never the type to flourish or exaggerate a story. He was fact oriented and had a soft casual style that made a believer out of everyone with his matter-of-fact explanation. It was raining hard he said, when they were suddenly blinded by a white flash and shocked by the deafening boom. No one was injured, but the vehicle started to sputter and came to a stop when they pulled over to the side of the road. They had received a direct hit, one of those surprisingly rare vehicular events during storms. A car immediately stopped behind them, and both vehicles waited for the rain to stop. The occupants of the other vehicle confirmed the strike and were amazed that everyone had survived without injury. When the group inspected the vehicle they noticed a rear flat tire and a missing radio antenna. All that remained of the flexible rod along the passenger front of the Bronco was a melted stub. They changed the tire and managed to start the vehicle. They drove it to a local Ford dealership where some repairs to the electrical system were made. I’ve always wondered how the vehicle faired after that incident.
Frank and I met years ago when we both attended South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City. Frank lost his father the summer after his senior year in high school. As the oldest adult son, he had to assume responsibility for a household with six others, a working mother, a younger brother, four younger sisters, and a partially completed family home. Frank left school after his freshman year at Mines, was later drafted in the army and served in Vietnam on the front lines where he was seriously wounded in a Viet Cong ambush.
Rapid Creek flows east out of the Black Hills, then through town and later into the Cheyenne River. On June 9th 1972, it overflowed after a slow moving thunderstorm dumped more than six inches of rain near Lake Pactola 20 miles west. A 20-ft wall of water surged down canyon into Canyon Lake at the west end of town breaching a dam and sending millions of gallons of water into low-lying areas of town late that evening. Back then, Rapid City had no flood zone and little thought was given to flood control. Numerous residences and small businesses dotted the creek including the neighborhood in which Frank and his wife had their garden level apartment. As Frank told the story to me, they were in Arizona visiting relatives and only heard about the storm while driving back to Rapid City. They stopped at a roadblock outside the city the next day. State police were only allowing residents back to town. They managed to find their apartment via a circuitous route, but lost everything. The apartment building was gutted, but they were clearly very lucky.
According to meteorological records, the Rapid City flood of 1972 may have been a 500-year event, usually referred in scientific terms as a 0.2 percent probability storm, meaning that on any given day during the summer thunderstorm season, there is a 1 in 500 chance of such an event occurring. The standard for catastrophe is the 1 percent event or hundred year storm, but that concept is not really correct. Two back-to-back 100-year events could occur on consecutive days. Recent geological research has revealed at least two previous prehistoric floods along Rapid Creek.
I continued driving east from Folsom, reaching the Oklahoma Panhandle and Boise City (pronounced Boiz City), the county seat of Cimarron County in the heart of short grass prairie country by mid afternoon. No rain yet, but the threat seemed imminent, especially to the south. I turned to AM radio and heard nothing but static. I found a strong FM signal from a station in Dalhart, Texas 50 miles away in the Texas Panhandle. A tornado watch was already in effect there, and the area was experiencing a severe thunderstorm with hail and damaging winds. That storm was headed to the northeast toward my destination, Meade State Park, and would probably arrive there to greet me. In Boise City, I turned northeast onto US-56 toward Elkhart and Hugoton, Kansas. As I passed through the outskirts of Elkhart, I noticed men armed with binoculars peering into the sky, a first line of defense for their local warning system.
Hugoton is situated in the center of a large natural gas field named after the community. Thousands of gas wells dot the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and southwestern Kansas. The wells produce both combustible gas and helium in vast quantities from Permian-aged limestones providing the biggest source of revenue and jobs for the region. The towns in southwestern Kansas are shabby looking, some aging grain elevators, dilapidated gas stations, oil field debris, but always a friendly sign welcoming travelers. The physical appearance, architecture, and general character of these communities reflect the nature of the economy. A rancher once told me it was a sign of progress. They hide their money well.
As I looked overhead into the fearsome gray mass, a few drops of rain began to fall. The clouds were turbulent, almost frenzied, a result of rapid convection and rotation. I was driving faster now, maybe a little anxious, as I headed east on US-160 toward Meade. I was only a few miles from my final turnoff when I realized my chances of getting to the state park were not good. Dalhart next announced a tornado on the ground somewhere north of Amarillo. The storm was closing in on me. I was right on the edge of a large cell as I reached the village of Plains and my final turn south to Meade. I decided to give it a shot knowing that I could quickly turn around in relative safety.
At first it was just heavy rain, large drops pelting my roof, but I couldn’t see far ahead, just an opaque gray wall extending all the way to the ground—I knew it was hail before I heard it. First only a few dings, then a rata-tat machine-gun surge of quarter-sized balls of ice. As the hail intensified, I made up my mind. No one was around, so I slowed and did a U-turn. My jeep had received major hail damage a few years earlier and was fully depreciated. I was generously paid by State Farm and knew that any further damage would be on me. My biggest worry was a cracked windshield. I sped back to Plains leaving the hail behind, stopping briefly under the canopy of an abandoned gas station, then driving east for several miles ahead of the storm. I passed through Meade and continued east on US-54 occasionally looking back toward the dark mass behind me. I made a decision then (a smart one) to abandon my plan to camp and simply drive for an hour to one of several small towns along US-54 and weather the storm in a cheap motel.
It was now getting late, maybe 6:30 pm but still light in May in the westernmost part of the Central Time Zone. I was tired of driving and seriously hungry, but I felt exhilarated by my fascination with a phenomenal storm. I lost Dalhart radio just after its tornado warning was cancelled. A tornado watch was still in effect throughout the region. I found another local station nearby with broadcast alerts.
I pulled into Minneola about 7 pm. Dusk was fast approaching so I found a place to stay, something like The Sands, “Whispering Pines”, or Sleepy Hollow. I pulled into a parking lot and looked back at the approaching storm. I checked in and the manager explained the tornado plan: if the sirens sounded, guests were to meet in the lobby before heading to the basement. The plan didn’t sound reassuring to me, but I agreed to show up if the threat materialized. I unpacked a few necessities, washed up and prepared to find some grub, a difficult task in a small Midwest town of fast food and slow taste. The storm hit just as I was about to leave the motel. Rain came in sheets as the wind gusted. Lightning intensified as I stood in the doorway, watching the trees bend in the onslaught. Low lying areas, now illuminated by street lights, flooded quickly. No sirens, thankfully. After about 20 minutes, the wind ceased and rain slowed, and then just a drizzle as I jumped in my jeep in search of food. Other cars were on the streets and life returned to normal.
Greensburg, Kansas, situated 40 miles east of Minneola on route 54, was also lucky that evening, but its fortunes were reversed two years earlier, in May, 2007 during a tornado outbreak that spawned 129 tornadoes in a three day period causing more than $260 million in damage. The community was virtually destroyed by one of them, a devastating EF-5 monster that hit on May 5th killing 11 and injuring 60. Eighty four tornadoes were reported in the region that day. The outbreak represented the confluence of several factors: moisture from the Gulf, a low pressure area, wind shear, and a dry line to the west. The Greensburg tornado may have started as two closely spaced funnels that coalesced into a massive twister 1.7 miles wide, wider than the town itself. Buildings were simply blown off their foundations and swept away by 200 mph winds. Cars were thrown through the air and landed up to a mile away. Although the loss of life and property was significant, it was remarkable that more people weren’t killed, especially after viewing photos of the community after the storm. I guess I was lucky to spend the night in Minneola in March, 2009 rather than Greenburg in May, 2007. I shudder to think what it would have been like in the basement of a small rickety motel, listening to the roar of the wind, shattering window glass, crashing debris, and the sound of my screams.
THADDEUS DYMAN 