The Times and Travels of Nolan
Documenting trips I've taken and places I've seen.
I was bored. It was already mid-to-late April, and we were trapped in a pattern that encouraged absolutely beautiful weather and not much moisture from the Gulf. Naturally, I was losing my mind in quarantine. I didn’t need much encouragement to get out and chase, and a low-moisture, high-based supercell threat in “God’s country” of …
Continue reading “Chase Log: April 21, 2020 near Canadian, TX – the Hail Chase”
The first chase of the year assumes a magical quality. After a long fall and winter, there is nothing that raises my spirits more than the feel of mid-60s dewpoints, the sight of the Rolling Plains as far as the eye can see, and towers rising out of the cumulus field all around you. For …
Continue reading “Chase Log: April 11, 2020 near Haskell, TX”
December 31, 2019: the last day of the decade, and an opportunity for me to conquer a fear: skiing. Elizabeth had elaborately planned a route down the slopes of Vail that covered my minor skiing flaws: namely, that I had never been on a chairlift and that I had no fricking clue what I was …
Continue reading “New Year 2020: The Trip Where I (Kinda) Learned to Ski (Days Three and Four)”
May 17 dawned hazy and humid, the way all great storm days should. I woke up in the Colby, Kansas Holiday Inn feeling absolutely stoked. The SPC had outlined a large enhanced risk area across much of Nebraska, including a 10% tornado probability near the warm front. After all the waiting, it was go time. …
Continue reading “TORUS: An Eventful Beginning (May 17, 2019: McCook, NE)”
As an undergraduate member of TORUS, I was only around for the duration of May. In some respects, that meant I felt the clock ticking from the moment our deployment window opened. Given that, May 15 and 16 could have come across as real bummers. Packed firmly under a 500 mb ridge, there was clearly …
I’ll never forget the moment that I learned that I had been selected to be part of a dang tornado research campaign. Elizabeth and I were on vacation, in a cab in Montego Bay, Jamaica. We hadn’t had any contact with the outside world for a couple of days, and so when she turned her …
On July 14, 2018, Elizabeth and I tried one of our most challenging hikes – Guadalupe Peak in Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
When I think about snow days in my childhood, I think about sitting in front of the TV, waiting for my school district to show up on the crawl at the bottom with the word “CLOSED”. I think of staying hunkered down all day against blowing and drifting snow, and bitter sub-zero wind chills, and …
Have you ever dreaded something so much that you contemplate pretending to sprain your ankle to get out of it? I won’t say that’s how scared I was of learning how to ski, but I wasn’t far off on the morning of December 30, 2019. Elizabeth and Pam did a great job of trying to …
Continue reading “New Year 2020: The Trip Where I (Kinda) Learned to Ski (Day Two)”
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I may not qualify as an old dog, but I wasn’t convinced that I could ever learn to ski. Despite growing up in West Michigan, less than half an hour from a ski area, I had only attempted it once in my life – a …
Continue reading “New Year 2020: The Trip Where I (Kinda) Learned to Ski (Day One)”
