(Looking west) I get to Camp Wood and loiter around for 20 minutes or so. During this time I take a back dirt (park) road to the west toward the storm and the areas of rotation. I cross a creek or river also. The storm has lots of embedded rotation showing on Threatnet (almost all over 100mph) with some areas also on the southern flank (to the left). This storm has grown very large and more HP like than when it started. I don’t know what I was thinking. This was a serious monster storm of giant hail and high wind as I was about to find out. Fortunately I had the sense to turn around from the park road, go back through town to the south, where I waited on the southern edge of town as this approached and took a picture. I barely got this shot off and a couple more - all blurry as golfball hail was starting to zing. The dark edge coming across the hill / mountain had a fairly solid edge (hard to tell in the picture because it is blurry). I thought there was a good chance it could be an embedded tornado. It may have been. Suddenly I also hear a huge roar - louder than any hail roar I ever heard. It sounded like being close on the flight line with a number of B52 jets trying to take off under full power. WOW!  Time to GO! And not a moment too soon as baseball hail began to pummel my vehicle and high wind hit blowing across the road from north to south. The wind became extreme - I don’t know how fast, and the rain was hitting so hard it was blinding with practically zero visibility as I pushed on relentlessly, hopefully out of the storm. This continued for nearly 15 to 18 miles until I finally exited this beast that nearly ate me (well it did taste me). By then I was all the way in Uvalde county!

Emerging on the southern end finally, I begin taking pictures of the storm and the landscape after I catch my breath. It’s a beautiful, rugged country with precipitation in progress.

More of the countryside.

Within the nearby precipitation looking east I see some lowerings in the rain that should correspond with some of the areas of rotation on Threatnet.

Here’s a lowered wall cloud like area not in quite as much rain. Not much rotation that I can see.

Here is an area of rotation (center of screen) where you can see a small funnel appendage (darker) protruding from the cloud base. There was some up and down motion here, but not a lot of rotation.

A closer view of the funnel as it becomes a bit more pronounced. It appears it may be connected with the more defined edge further up toward the top right of the picture.

A pull back again, for perspective as we enjoy this serene view of nature.

This may have been the same area a bit further south as it appears to rain out some.

And another interesting area approaches.

Here about the same time as those rainy wall clouds were ongoing I shot up higher in the cloud and caught this. Notice the two tiny specks in the center of the image. Those are actually Turkey Buzzards otherwise known as the Texas Black Eagle ;-). Click on this image and you get a much larger image that you can zoom easily.

After this I exited to the town of Uvalde, got gas and tried to exit east for home, but this mean storm was crossing the road further east. I headed back to Uvalde and got a nice dinner at Golden Corral and then headed back home followed by another potential tornadic storm to my west. Along the way on I10 there were a number of wrecked vehicles and blown over signs. Law enforcement and emergency vehicles were out in force. I didn’t get home until about 1 or 2 am.

© All images on this site Copyright  Bill Tabor unless otherwise noted