MON 01 JUN
Had to leave Salina KS quite early as we had a long drive to Denver Airport CO to drop Liam off and then catch a storm conveniently in NE Colorado. As we approached Denver around 14:00 a supercell thunderstorm developed rapidly over the metro and nudged gradually northeastwards towards the airport, so we had a bit of a frantic drive to get to the airport, drop Liam off and get back out before getting stuck in large hail. The amount of traffic on the roads around the airport did not help, especially with people parking underneath bridges and completely blocking freeways for a bit of rain and small hail - so dangerous!
Anyway, we managed to just about get ahead of the storm east of Denver and briefly stopped at Bennett CO to fuel up and grab some lunch. By this point the storm had become much better organised with a clear RFD cut and became tornado warned. It felt like it could produce a tornado at any moment looking at the cloud motion and RFD cut, but it failed to. We nudged east past Byers CO towards Last Chance CO, by which stage new cells had begun to form to our north and northeast. Over time these became more dominant, so we left our original cell behind us and followed these new ones near Akron CO, Otis CO and Yuma CO, one which produced a short lived tornado revealed by a tight ground circulation beneath a funnel aloft. These then became rather HP and upscaled into a bigger complex, so we waved these goodbye and headed north to a hotel in Sidney NE as this was in the right direction for the next day's chase.
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