My road through publishing has been twisted since Funnel Vision, Tornado Pinball and Zap Bang. How can writers choose their happiest path? The release of Twisters this summer has me thinking a lot about fictional accounts of storm chasing—and my own writing. I’m a storm chaser, and I took the movie for what it was: …
Almost every year, I seek to capture the enchanting unfolding of night-blooming cereus flowers. Each giant blossom of these cactus vines blooms for just one night. The blooming season lasts a few weeks in the spring, though it seemed a bit longer this year – in fact, I just saw a bloom a couple of …
We started May 23 with casual optimism about our chase prospects. The fun part was that Alethea Kontis and I were storm chasing with Jason Persoff and Dave Lewison (Bill Hark had ended up elsewhere the previous day, but he would get great close-up views of what was to come). And we were chasing dryline …
May 19 produced the storm we’d been waiting for the whole trip, the best storm so far — though another even more extraordinary one would come later. And it was a great day even if we didn’t see — really see — the tornado. More on that in a minute. We figured storms would …
The thing about “chasing scraps,” as we call it when there isn’t a really promising forecast for supercells, is that it can wear you out. That’s partly because of all the driving – if you’re ambitious, you go wherever there’s a chance of storms. So after a couple of days of photographing beautiful places …
I have extensive archives from my early storm chasing years. I chronicled almost every day on the road, even bust days, at the old SkyDiary site, with lots of photos. In the interest of collecting everything in one place, I’m moving edited journals and highlights of the older chases to ChrisKridler.com, with select photos to …
