February 24th, 2017 Michigan/Indiana Bust

Tornadoes: 0

Highest Wind Gust: ~25 mph

Largest Hail: N/A

I don't even remember the setup for this event. I don't even really care. I do know that it looked much better a couple days prior, but we had basically committed to chasing even when we knew it looked like garbage the morning of. A warm front was lifting across Northern Indiana into extreme southern Michigan, and maybe there would be a shot at some supercells as storms developed and approached the front.

SPC Outlook:

The morning of I had (somehow) convinced my mom to call me off school. The plan was to meet Matt Zuro and Daniela Barrios at Jewel in Shorewood, then target somewhere in north-central Indiana. I had assured my mom that we were taking Daniela's car since she wouldn't let me go otherwise. The problem was that Daniela wasn't supposed to drive her car long distances either. So I flat-out lied to my mom and drove my crappy '03 Malibu that was in questionable working order to Shorewood to pick them up, and then a few hours east to the town of LaGrange, Indiana.

Lemme tell ya somethin' 'bout LaGrange: not my idea of a modern town. That's putting it very lightly. Amish buggies everywhere. Horse manure everywhere. Everything looked sketchy. I'm from a small farm town myself, but nothing even close to this.

We went to the McDonald's in town, and as we parked we heard a clinking sound in the back passenger door. Thinking we just hit a big rock or something, we went inside where we met with Matt Magiera who was partnered with a non-chaser friend of his. He was looking over weather data and basically confirming that there was little hope for tornado prospects. Elevated convection was preventing destabilization close to the warm front and wind fields were becoming increasingly veered.

Zuro, Daniela, and I went back to the car to just to take a short drive through the country to sample the chase terrain. It was...not ideal. We had heard from some weather enthusiasts that northern Indiana and southern Michigan were not too bad for chase terrain, but all we could see were trees. At some point during the drive, Daniela tried to roll her window down only to realize it wasn't working. We came to the conclusion that the clinking sound was part of the window mechanism (I'm sure there's a word for it but I don't know cars okay) falling down into the door. Not knowing what to do to fix it, we made our way to the Dollar General in town to pick up some tape just to keep the window from sliding down. There were maybe 4 parking spots for cars, but about 10 for Amish buggies, and they were all loaded with horse crap. What a place.

Matt and Daniela wait patiently (hopelessly) behind a freshly taped up window.

Surface-based storms started going up to our northwest on the Indiana/Michigan border. They looked junky but they were all we had. We drove north to Sturgis, MI (I had a picture on my old phone of the "Welcome to Michigan" sign as I had never been to Michigan before. But my phone got run over by a lawn mower over the summer and I hadn't backed it up so guess who doesn't have the picture?) where we decided we had to get west. Arriving in White Pigeon, we got to the north side of town where we saw this INCREDIBLE, AMAZING, ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME structure(!!!):

So we had a transient wall cloud before it all filled in with rain. Cool. And cool it was. And by that I mean it was cold. It had to be 55 degrees in the inflow and I didn't bring a jacket. What could possibly make this day worse?

I had noticed a little crack in one of my back tires while watching the storm. I kinda got anxious about it and for some reason thought patching it was one piece of duct tape would make it all better. But I decided anyway that it had probably already been there and it wasn't a problem.

Oh, it was a problem. After we decided to start heading home defeated, we felt something wasn't right when we turned. It felt like we were drifting. About 3 minutes later, we found out why. Tire went flat. Fantaaaaaaaaastic.

At least we were near a gas station. None of us could change a tire (I already said I know nothing about cars okay, get off my back) but THANKFULLY Magiera was nearby to save us. He put on the tiny spare donut as Jake Thompson and a few other chasers pulled up. Having talked to Jake a bit on Twitter we went up to say hello. At least that was kinda neat.

Now came the EXTRA fun part. Driving 200 miles back to my place on a spare at 45 mph. I'm not even going to detail it all, but what should've been a 3 hour drive took 8 hours. And when I finally got home, my mom had a few choice words selected for me.

Not my best day on earth.

SPC storm reports: