Tornado Warning at Little River Canyon

On January 11th, we woke up to severe weather warnings in Florence, AL. We checked our phones to see when and where the warnings indicated it would be worst. It appeared to be coming west to east, so we decided to head out early and stay ahead of it.

We made it to Huntsville and the wind had seemed to fade significantly. We stopped for brunch at a dog park at the Indian Creek Greenway where Aiden could get energy out as well. Around 11am the wind picked up again, checking our phones we saw that strong winds were now indicated in Huntsville as well, but not much past it.

We continued with our plan to stay ahead of the bad weather. We made it into the mountains in the northeast of Alabama and thought we were safe. We decided to set our goal for Rome, GA, for the night, but no longer felt that we were in a rush.

It wasn't very windy anymore when we reached Fort Payne, AL. Just past the town, we came across Little River Canyon and decided to take the detour to see it. It was our first actual mountains in several months. The river and waterfall were gorgeous. We struck up a conversation with some white water kayakers who were pulling out for the day.

  

 

Leaving the second overlook, it started to rain again, and shortly after started to get windy. As soon as we reached the third overlook, we got a tornado warning on our phone telling us to take cover for the next 30 minutes. At this point, there wasn't much that we could do. We positioned the RV in to overlook parking area towards the center, so that no trees could fall on us and we turned on the radio, listening for weather coverage.

After a bit of heavy winds and rains, the wind started to let up and we decided we would head back to the Fort Payne Walmart and wait out the storm there. At least if something happened to us there we would have people around.

Driving back out of the scenic drive, we came across a downed tree on the road and felt lucky to not have been driving when the warning came to our phones. We were able to clear away just enough of the tree to squeeze by and continued on to Fort Payne.

All in all, we know this could have gone worse and feel lucky we avoided an actual tornado. Below is a map of where tornados actually hit that day. We do think that we did the right thing by trying to staying ahead of the storm front. We knew we were traveling faster than it and not being in a storm at all would have been the best outcome. We did get a bit complacent after reaching the mountains. We probably should have either kept moving or stopped in a population center. 

Image from Wikipedia