June 9th 2012

The planned target on this particular day was somewhere in the Fargo, ND area. The models seemed to show atleast a localized tornado threat with CAPE forecasted to be in the 3000-3500Jkg range and EHIs to about 8. A strong warm front was moving north along with a trailing colf front that would be our trigger for the storms that day...The SPC maintained a slight risk for a good portion of our taret area for most of the day.

I met up with Adam Lucio, Billie Marcum, and Alec Scholten around 4:30am at my house in Janesville, WI, From there our plan was to marathon it all the way to Fargo, ND and meet up with a few other chasers at a local hotel and determine our target from there. We arrived in Fargo around 1:30 pm and proceeded to get lost looking for the hotel...after we arrived finaly we sat around talking the day and pouring over models determining the best spot to chase. After several minutes of discussion we agreed to head north a ways towards Grand Forks, ND and then head west from there.

After a quick bite to eat we made our way towards our target and decided to stop on an old road that was filled with potholes and bumps like youve never experienced before. After sitting at our area for awhile it became apparent that the CAP was holding pretty strong and it looked like it was going to be an almost certain blue sky bust. Just when mood where getting down in the dumps Adam all of the sudden perked up and yelled "look at that one go up" We sat there for a few minutes and pretty soon the storm was going up fast and the chase was on!

The one biggest mistake we made was not filling the gas tank up before getting there so we had to shoot north to a gas station before flying east to catch the storm near Cavalier, ND. As we approached the storm it had several good looking feature on it, but the base seemed to be pretty high so we turned on to a gravel road and headed north and east to get out ahead of it to get a better look. As we approached the storm from the south we noticed a rather small but mean looking hail shaft with it.

As we continues down the road we came through an area where hail had previously falled and looked to be golf ball sizee and maybe even larger. The storm at times did seem to show some weak rotation but never truly could get its act together, at this point we were rapidly approaching the Canadian border and knew we would be unable to cross into Canada.

As we go close enough to know we had to abandon it, our fearless leader looked behind us and yelled very excitedly and scared the ever loving bejeses out of us and pulled over rather quickly. What we saw in the next few minutes may not have been what we came for, but we sure were rewarded with the beauty mother nature has to hold.

All in all it was a great day with many great moments and awesome laughs along the way. North Dakota is a beautiful state that I would love to go back to again soon.

You can go to aerostorms.com and get a more detailed description of our chase in probably a week or so. I look forward to many more chases and great moments like this one!