Chase 5-25-25 Afton, TX

Published on May 25, 2025

QUOTE OF THE CHASE: “DADDY! THAT WAS AN ARMORED CAR!!!” – My 5 year old.

Let’s give this a try on editing after the chase! We eyeballed this day earlier in the week. SPC put out the enhanced on the day 2 update the day before. Now a special thing about us is that my family will sometimes join me in chasing. My wife also has her meteorology degree and our boys have been able to see some cool stuff over the years. I obviously take it a bit easier when I have them. My wife made the decision that everyone was going to go about 2 hours before I knew the call would come down. So cameras loaded, mounted, and off we went.

The original plan was to go east, grab the then Floydada/Matador storm, stay on it for a bit as it interacted with the front, then race west to get stuff popping on the dryline. As the primary storm became a monster and started manipulating the surface frontal boundary, I knew we might just stay there. And indeed anything that popped west for the most part did so in a post-frontal environment and were hailers. The exception being that picturesque tornado out by Floyd and Portales, NM. Sudan also had very large hail from those.

Anyway, back to the primary storm. We get on scene by the time the storm is just northwest of Afton. Great structure. I observed a funnel cloud before I could get setup. We pulled back a little bit. Very healthy storm with great inflow. In that unstable environment, the shear aloft was impressive.

After a few minutes there, it became time to move again. I’m going to get up on my soap box a bit. I’m not one to usually be preachy, and I know the folks guilty of this probably aren’t reading things like this blog…. but we need to do better folks. The chaser convergence was bad in a place that does not have the road network to support that many vehicles. I think that comes with the territory nowadays, but what I was really getting upset with was people simply not moving… and I found out why. I probably witnessed north of 20 people opening up car doors into traffic and stepping right out… I lost count of how many vehicles parking with either their left sides still on the asphalt on a shoulderless road, or JUST off the road, that’s dangerous enough, but then see above for what happened next… but then there was some people literally taking pictures and video standing in the middle of an active road with a 75mph speed limit (no one was going 75, but still). Not naming names, but one of those was a reputable tour company allowing folks to do that. Guys, lets stay safe out there, PLEASE. All that did was cause people to either stop or slow WAY down, jamming up traffic, and before long you have these trains of vehicles literally miles long. I’m happy people want to chase and learn more about the weather, but we’ve got to be responsible, or things like Chasing licenses in Oklahoma are going to be brought up more then just there. OK, stepping off the soap box.

Once we broke free from the traffic, I was finally able to turn back into the storm. Still a ton of rotation, saw another funnel, and this was also about the time I started hearing of the monster hail back toward Afton. Winds were ok enough I even got the drone up for a few minutes.

We dropped back to US82, stopped a few points along the way. Got a little worried about Guthrie for a few minutes but the bulk of the storm went north. As the storm passed off to the east, hindsight being 20/20, I should have pressed on to get all the great views folks in Haskell and Stamford got, but alas, it’s out of our viewing area and this day I was chasing for the station.

And then we headed home. Looks like we’ll have a few days of storms that aren’t really chasable, but Thursday, May 29th, could be another target day. Stay tuned!