Start: Raton, NM
Lunch: Springer, NM (Dairy Delight)
End: Tucumcari
302 miles
Finally, relatively decent moisture had returned to the High Plains, and shear and instability were looking fabulous for supercells. SPC showed a slight risk for both eastern NM and eastern CO, and a 2 percent tornado area along the Palmer Divide in Colorado. Moisture appeared to be a bit better along I-40 into eastern NM, so we rolled down to Tucumcari from Raton, via Roy and Logan. We got in front of a rapidly developing severe storm south of Tucumcari, west of the small town of House, NM. It quickly became an HP supercell, with a ground-scraping wall cloud.
This was quite the beast of a storm, and it was drifting ever so slowly to the north-northeast. Our road westward out of House worked perfectly for starters, but in order to get north again we had to retreat eastward about ten miles. Given the HP nature of the storm, and the low likelihood of even seeing a tornado if one should develop, this was not too irritating. We were afforded fantastic looks at the storm structure, which became more and more impressive into the early evening hours. The images below are looking to the west from between McAlister and Quay. Some chasers reported a tornado with the storm at dark.
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