Police Standoff, Caprock Canyons Park & Dismal May Ahead

After work yesterday, I went and checked out Caprock Canyons State Park & Trailways. This is an incredible destination and one that has quickly jumped to the top of my list. The scenery is stunning with excellent facilities fo camping, hiking, exploring, fishing and photography. In fact, the small deep lake there is an excellent fishery with bass, crappie and catfish. While I was talking to a gentleman there, he caught a decent bass right on cue!! More to come with pictures.

In fact, according to the models, May is quickly shaping up to be another big dud as we've too often seen the past decade. Already here around the first of the month, the jet stream has quickly migrated north into the Dakotas and upper Mississippi valley region. It was waaaayyyy too early for such a pattern to setup...but setup it has. This will pretty much put the chase season directly into the crapper for any hope of good chases around these parts. There might be an isolated opportunity or two by mid week, but I'm not holding my breath. After that, things appear to go downhill in a hurry and brings the chase season to a rude and abrupt halt for awhile. Unfortunately, the ECMWF is in step with the GFS and spaghetti plots....for several runs now. I guess there is always June, eh?

I will definitely be stepping up my other hobbies as I mentioned previously. Some fishing and camping trips are being planned (if we can avoid the 100F+ heat!) along with other excursions and entertainment. The chase gear certainly will be stowed away for awhile in favor of a fishing pole. ;-)

As for chasing today, the RUC and current observations tell me no way in hell to even bother trying today. [sigh] With such a dismal forecast ahead, I think I'll have time to migrate my blog away from Google Blogger and into something better. For the past month, my blog has been threatened to be locked down as it was somehow flagged as a possible spam blog. For the third time this morning, I've had to "request a review" for it to be unlocked which, according to THEIR spam message says should only take a few days. After exceeding 30 days and apparently no way of contacting anybody to get this resolved, enough is enough. Idiots.

Back to my day yesterday, on the way back home, Jay McCoy informs me of a police standoff just a couple of blocks from where I live. Being the budding cub reporter, I setup my camera across the street and tweaked the camera for the low-light situation, and got some excellent video including the final surrender and handcuffing of the suspect. Full story here.