Downs, KS Supercell "Mothership" & Tornado- June 7th, 2008

We started the day in Fort Scott, KS where we agreed that our target area for that day would be somewhere in either south central Nebraska, or north central Kansas. We headed out around 10am and much to our surprise, Chris Kridler (who was set to fly out that afternoon) decided to hang around one more day and chase with us! A great surprise and well worth it in the end. We headed up route 69 in extreme eastern Kansas and while cruising along, we had a 2002 or 2003 Black Camaro pass us on the shoulder moving at around 120 mph, no I'm not kidding...lol, and right after that a cop car went flying by. It was a high speed chase!! WOW, I've never seen that before. Anyway, back to the chase. We arrived in Beatrice, NE around 3pm and spoke with Charles Edwards of Cloud 9 Tours. We discussed the days target and Charles informed us that there were some cells going up in Kansas to our southwest...maybe about 85 miles away. At this point however I have to admit, I wasn't too excited due to the fact that they looked pretty linear and I figured that was it for the day...we're going to have a raging squall line. Well, it didn't work out that way. The line never fully formed, or I should say...never unzipped all the way down into southern Kansas. Instead the storms just kept rebuilding over the same area. We decided to head down that way and investigate. Basically there were three storms we were interested in towards the southern end of this line. We investigated the northern storm first and that one looked okay, but a bit too high based for our liking. Still though, we managed some great photo ops before deciding to move on to the middle storm. That storm was located near the town of Jewell, KS. Jewell had actually been hit by an EF3 tornado just two weeks before, so it was a sight to see a supercell and wall cloud in the background with the still fresh tornado damage in the foreground. After about 30 minutes of grabbing video and stills from that location (and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes) we decided to investigate the southern most cell. This cell had now become dominant and WOW....what an amazing storm this was!!! As we got closer we could see the classic UFO/Mothership appearance this storm had. I was in awe and couldn't wait to get closer and we all felt that this storm had the best shot at producing a tornado. We passed the town of Cawker City, KS (where the world's largest ball of twine is located) and then through the town of Downs, KS where by now..the base of the supercell was clearly visible. We decided to pull off at the intersection of route 281. We could hear the hail roar from this storm and knew that we had to proceed with caution. We shot video for a while and the entire time we could see the base rotating and the wall cloud which was now visible to our west had a classic look to it. Right as we decided to reposition a bit further east a funnel became visible and about a mile down the road, we pulled back over and set up our cameras in anticipation...this was it!! The wall cloud was now just to our north and spinning like a top!! After about a minute of shooting video we could see that a tiny pencil like funnel was forming and before long, it touched down and we had a tornado!! It was brief and small, but it was a tornado none the less and needless to say....we were all very excited! We decided to follow this storm after the sun set since it still had an amazing radar presentation on it, but it did not go on to produce another tornado. Well, not any that we saw at least..but there were some ominous funnel like clouds that we witnessed right at twilight. An amazing day overall and a nice way to end our 2008 spot chase! We started the long drive back to Colby, KS where we set up for the night...got about 4 hours of sleep and then drove back to Denver to catch our flight home. Wheew!!! What a trip!!