We left Ofallon early on June 16th to head to Nebraska, although the outlook wasn't very good we had time to spare and were determined to spend a couple days on the road. We traced our path from earlier in the year across Nebraska. We continued west past Thedford Nebraska as we noticed some storm development south of Arthur Nebraska. As we approached the storm we were treated with some mammatus clouds on the anvil of the storm. As we got closer we could see the storm base, we pulled to a side road and set the cameras up for both video and stills. The storm just couldn't seem to really get itself together, one moment it was looking better just to weaken again. We watched this storm for about an hour before giving up and heading to Valentine, NE for the evening.

June 17 we were up early to head to Minnesota from northern Nebraska. Aaron and I were determined to not get caught behind the storms as has happened on several occasions. This comes from our inexperience, the aww factor of the storms in the plains, and wanting to take pictures and video. We drove through the cold front in South Dakota and stopped just as we entered Minnesota to fill our gas tank and stomachs. We had a plan to keep ahead of the system on 90 and then head off the main interstate once the storms developed. We caught one of the first southern cells going up and started tracking it through the back roads, this storm really showed nothing of interest, but we followed it until our eyes happened to catch a line of towers about 40 miles to our east. It had happened again, we were behind the main show. We headed east and caught the line around Lake Crystal and parked just south of Mankato to shoot video and grab some pictures, we saw a very small funnel on this storm before it became rain wrapped. The rotation wrapped the wall cloud of the storm over Mankato, so we headed east to Waseca, from there we headed south to split 2 supercells, this is when things got very intense for us. We split the two storms but couldn't get a good view of the storm to our west, the southern of the two storms was showing some rotation so we headed for it. By the time we were on a decent eastern road the rotation was to close to try and get in front of the storm. We parked and waited for the rotation to pass about a mile to our east, at this moment we had 4-5 radar indicated tornados surrounding us within 10 miles. When we headed east we witnessed our first tornado damage. All trees in the path were twisted off within 6-8 feet of the ground, two homes had all windows blown out and a pole barn was stripped of it's outer shell. We streamed this damage live over the internet but stopped the stream not knowing if anyone was injured our not.

At this point we had to try and thread the needle between 5 tornadic supercells, we continued east, then north, then back west to Mankato for the evening.

Pictures can be seen in our Photo Gallery