Once again, the weather pattern kept us out of our domain on Friday in an attempt to intercept any storm that popped up. We headed northwest out of Hot Springs, SD to scan a developing cell to the north of Hot Springs in the Black Hills. The cell looked promising, but we were unable to chase because of the road network and hilly terrain. The cell died soon after anyway as it passed into the valley. After un-deploying form that storm we moved east in attempt to intercept a storm leaving the Black Hills into the valley. The storm lived for a short time after, but soon died also. During the last deployment DOW 7 decided to park next to a bee farm, so it was very difficult to leave the vehicles. After missions for the day were complete, we went out and did a imax shoot with the TIV and Sean Casey. We did several shots driving down a dirt road in different formations. The final shot was the most interesting; we had gone down a dirt road on the open range. A bull was situated 7 feet from our probes; let’s just say that it didn’t like our presence. The bull began to buck up and down and then charged after the last vehicle after we sped off. It was quite interesting.

After chasing in the Black Hills on Friday, we decided that despite a similar threat on Saturday we would head towards Nebraska to maybe catch a storm in that area. As we headed south, we got a report of a police spotted tornado in a cell near North Platte, NE. This was out target location. We were too far away to target this storm so we decided to stay west of that storm and target a new storm that was forming in a similar air mass. We intercepted the storm just south of I-80 near Paxton, NE. Our probe vehicles began to do north-south transects on the east side of the storm. We did not encounter anything that interesting on our transects, just some moderate rain. We soon ended out mission for the day and headed to our hotel in North Platte, NE.

On Sunday we had a travel day to head to Amarillo, TX. After arriving in Amarillo we went to the Big Texan to have dinner. This restaurant is famous for their 72oz steak (4 pounds), which is free if you can finish it, a baked potato, salad, and shrimp. Two people attempted it (not from our group) while we were there, they both failed. The restaurant has very nice decorations, however, I forgot my camera so I don’t have any pictures .