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Marvin Dansie
Coke and I had a great visit while we were in Utah.
We left on Thursday and headed for the Mountain Man Rendezvous in Ft. Bridger, Wyoming. It was an interesting historical celebration with many "characters" to watch. It was amazing to see all the creative handmade outfits, beadwork, pouches, fur hats, etc. Maybe we will go again the next time there is a Blue Moon in August.
We left Ft. Bridger around noon on Saturday to drive back to the northwest. It turned out to be a lot more exciting than we bargained for.
We were on I-84 heading toward Twin Falls, Idaho. A few miles before we reached the junction of I-84 and I-86 Coke made a few comments about the dark clouds we were headed for looking like cow utters (they were actually Mammatus Clouds or "mammary clouds" and they are often harbingers of extreme weather systems). It was raining a little bit but nothing serious (although there was a lot of lightening). Then off to the west on the top of one of the hills we noticed what looked like a couple of inky black clouds rising up from the top of the hill. I commented to Coke that I had never seen such black clouds. As we watched, the two clouds seemed to get bigger and bigger. I told Coke that it must be the wind blowing dust up from the top of the hill. Then, as we were watching, both clouds became columns that went up into the clouds – suddenly those black clouds had turned into two tornados and they were coming over the edge of the hill. That is when we hit the wall of water. It instantly started raining so hard that visibility was only a few feet. The wind was blowing everything sideways. The tumbleweeds and brush were flying by so fast (when we could actually see them) that it was unbelievable. The lightening flashs were only about a second apart. There had been a car ahead of us before we entered the maelstrom but I couldn’t see where it had gone. It was pretty exciting. Coke was yelling all kinds of instructions to me – but I was too busy trying to keep the car on the road and not hit anything. We finally passed the car that was ahead of us, it had made it out of the traffic lane and had stopped on the side of the road (fortunately the driver had turned on his flashers or I would never have seen him). I knew that there were several big trucks that were behind us so I decided to keep going as long as I could see the white line on the edge of the road (there were a few time that it disappeared – but only for a few moments). Coke was still yelling instructions to me (pull over, pull over) but declined to take over the drivers seat when I asked (she didn’t think it was all that funny). I kept driving and I noticed that it finally started to get lighter outside. It took a few more miles before we finally drove out from under that storm cell into just regular heavy rain. I noticed that no other cars or trucks had followed us out of the storm.
We finally got to our hotel in Nampa (just past Boise) and spent the night. We didn't know if anyone would believe that we actually saw a tornado, but just as we were leaving the hotel the next morning, the local weather was on TV and they reported that a tornado had been sighted the day before.
Who would have thought that there would be tornados in Idaho?
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