Headed out with Chris White. Started heading down towards northeast Kansas around 8:00 am for what looked like a boom or bust type chase. Models showed extreme instability, decent helicties, etc etc. SPC came out with a 10% tornado risk, 45% hatched hail. While heading down we narrowed our target down to Hiawatha, KS. Finally got down there about 4:00 pm and joined what is believed to be the largest chase convergence yet, and for good reason. I really wouldn't be surprised if half the states license plates were represented down there on this day. Anyways, looked like storms would go around 5:00 or 5:30, and we figured we had a little while before initiation. There was a pretty good cloud deck so we couldn't really see any towers going up, but not long after we pulled in to Hiawatha storms started to go (about 1 or 1 1/2 hours before everyone expected). Caught a little off guard, we hesitated a little bit before going after them to see if anything else would go. After realizing these were the only two storms that were gonna go at the time, we made a dash for the northern storm which had already gone tornado warned. Decided not to sit the million other chasers along the roads just west of Dawson, NE. We ended up along some county road northwest of Dawson which gave us an ok view of the wall cloud. Never really looked like it was going to produce and there wasn't a ton of motion with it that we could see but then again we were not right next to it either. Watched the wall cloud for a while, the storm motion really wasn't very fast so we were able to watch it for quite a while without even having to think about repositioning. After a while the tornado warning was allowed to expire and the storm started to die. I think we really sat on this storm for too long while the storm to the south started to take off. Had we taken off from the first storm earlier we would've beat atleast some of the literally hundreds of chasers all trying to get across the Missouri River using the same bridge and chase the only storm using the same road. But, instead we had to spend most of the rest of the day trying to catch back up to the storm. Luckily we didnt run in to the major hail that came out of this second storm. But, we couldn't have been far from the core. As we came through Oregon, MO there was hail all over the place and people were just coming out oftheir homes to get a look. That is the main reason I think we were so close to the core is as we drove through people were just seeing for the first time the damage from the storm. Chris and I pulled over in town as we saw a couple of Minnesota chasers we know who were checking out the hail. Largest I measured was about 3 inches in diameter which is by far the largest I've ever seen and really glad I didn't have to see it while it was falling. This stuff wasn't just big, it was solid and hard, not the mushy hail we sometimes see. Some chasers got some pretty serious damage to their cars unfortunately. Apparently, somewhere in the same town we stopped in a couple of chasers (I forget who) measured hail that was in excess of 5 inches in diameter, which to put in perspective is about an inch large in diameter than a softball. Also, while we were stopped in Oregon, we saw the TIV and some Vortex 2 cars pull through. After a little while we started playing catchup with the storm again. Never got real close to it again but did get a couple of distant views of the wall cloud. One thing I remember thinking is why are all these chasers parked this far away from the storm? Now that I think about it most of them probably weren't real chasers, probably just locals who didn't know what they were looking at. We finally stopped about a mile west of Maysville, surprisingly finding a relatively quiet dirt road off of highway 6. We were not the only chasers on this road as one of the DOWs' was just down the road from us, but other than that there were not a ton of people. We sat and watched what I'm now pretty sure was the updraft of the storm. The thing that threw move off was that this feature was moving perpendicular to the storm's motion (storm was moving east, the feature was moving south). But it was rotating and looking at it more, I'm pretty sure it was the updraft. Hard to saw what else was going on under neath it, but the only tornadoes that occurred this day were a brief, nonphotogenic tornado or two. After getting some good timelapse video, we headed in to Maysville to grab gas. The weird thing about the public and tornado sirens is that the majority of the public goes outside once the sirens start going off as was the case in Maysville. Luckily, nothing real ominous threatened today. Got out of Maysville, the storm wasn't doing much so we opted to start our 8 hour drive home instead of continuing to chase a not real active storm in the dark.

 

This is the wall cloud on the first storm. Like I said we were a bit far from it since we thought the storm motion was faster than it really was or we midjudged how far away we were. Doesn't look real ominous and it never really did:

 

 

The southern cell which had the classic nuclear bomb type structure to it. This is one of the rare photos I edited since the original didn't do the storm justice:

 

 

This is one last picture of the northern cell as we try to catchup with the southern one. Even thought this was one dying, it still had a nice looking updraft:

 

 

This is the feature that I said threw me for a loop. The lighting was obviously sort of weird but still a cool looking storm: