Press ‘Play’ above to see the McCarran Tornado in action

Since it was going to reach 105 degrees today, I decided to hop on my scooter and ride the VegasRex Loop at about 9am this morning.

For those of you who don’t know, the “VegasRex Loop” is about a 15 mile course. It roughly starts at Harmon & Paradise, north on Paradise to Sahara, west on Sahara, south on Las Vegas Boulevard along the entirety of The Strip, past the “Welcome to Vegas” sign, east on Russell past the airport, north on Eastern, west on Flamingo … sometimes returning to Harmon, or sometimes staying on Flamingo and crossing over to the Palms/Rio area.

I find this self-designed course that I ride fairly frequently to be helpful in giving me a reasonably complete snapshot of The Strip and it’s environs on any particular week.

There is usually something new on each ride.

But never anything like this.

Part of the VegasRex loop usually involves a stop at the “airplane watching place” , where I get off, stretch my legs, eat and drink a little something I have packed for myself, and just enjoy the smell of jet exhaust. Something about watching the big jets take off and land relaxes me.

So I did my thing at the airplane watching place, hung out a bit, and took off and made a left on Eastern. Then I saw something that made me immediately pull into a strip mall parking lot and whip out the camera.

Riding up Eastern, I saw what I thought looked like a frigging tornado at the end of the runway. A tornado? WTF?

So I ran up a grassy hill, and caught the end of the “tornado”. It was bigger when I first saw it, but I couldn’t very well videotape with a hand on the throttle.

There was this massive sand spinning thing at the end of runways 25R and 25L which was moving north to south. And planes were just landing through it like it was no big deal. It was maybe 100 feet high at one point, and about 50 feet wide toward the top. I started looking for Dorothy (and her little dog too).

I thought about it, and realized that landing planes cause wind vortexes with both from engines and from the wingtips, and that these vortexes pull up sand that surrounds McCarran Airport.

I have heard of things in the desert called “Dust Devils”, and this looked like a man-made version of one of those. In extreme cases they can grow quite large, and actually do some minor damage.

Vortex wind patterns exist on every active airport runway, but it is rare that there is enough fine sand at the end of a runway to illustrate these wind patterns in a way that is visible to the naked eye.

I have coined yet another term. “McCarran Tornado” or “MT” for short.

It’s actually pretty cool. I sat and watched several more planes land, but I didn’t see any more MT’s, so it appears that conditions have to be just perfect for one of these little things to form.

I don’t know what is more fun to watch, the Bellagio Fountains, or these things.

In Las Vegas, even the arriving runway puts on a show.