Chris Kridler
Chris Kridler is a writer, photographer and storm chaser and author of the Storm Seekers Series of storm-chasing adventures.
Chris Kridler is a writer, photographer and storm chaser and author of the Storm Seekers Series of storm-chasing adventures.
Our neighbors kept a dead palm’s trunk because it hosts these beautiful cactus flowers.
June 1 was a big night for the blossoms, so I set up a time-lapse with my GoPro to capture the blooming of three of these flowers. For the past couple of years, I’ve coaxed these vines to take hold on our oak tree after seeing an incredible picture of a tree in Orlando just dripping with the flowers. That’s a while off for our tree, but even a few of these blooms are gorgeous.
In the video, in addition to the time-lapse video, I show you some of the flowers growing on a palm tree in our yard, as well as a palm trunk in the neighborhood that is simply covered with blooms. Enjoy the magic!
Night-blooming cereus. The pink comes from extra lighting I added for this year’s video.
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 storms, which I enjoy. I can’t say our expectations were high; the Storm Prediction Center had outlooked a 5 percent tornado risk over a long vertical swath along the dryline and north, encompassing much of western Oklahoma, central Kansas and eastern Nebraska, but we had no idea what a spectacular day would unfold.
The Storm Prediction Center issued a slight risk of severe storms that included southwestern Oklahoma with a 5 percent tornado risk.
We aimed for northwest Oklahoma first and got partway there, ran into chaser friends and waited for a bit. I had increasing levels of anxiety as I watched the storms that formed farther south showing supercellular characteristics on radar. Fortunately, Jason and Dave were thinking the same thing, so we made the decision to head that way. Sometimes you stick to your initial target for good reasons, but as the day wears on – we’d passed 5 p.m. – you chase what presents itself. Thank goodness we did.
We stopped west of Duke to survey an approaching supercell near Hollis, peering through humid, dusty, hazy air. The photos show how weird and dreamlike it appeared. It hadn’t yet started to spin like mad. It took a collision of cells to do that.
Our two vehicles repositioned south to different locations as our target storm approached. Alethea and I found a spot atop a hill on an atmospheric red-earth road off Route 34 that offered an amazing view as the storm tightened up and its structure evolved into a layered spinning top. It almost tornadoed, producing a scuddy lowering. But as the cell eased closer and we started to get pinged by hail, we made the decision to back off a bit down to Route 6, which, as any chaser knows who was there that day, was closed eastbound for construction. Argh!
We thought the storm might be on the verge of a tornado at 6:42 p.m.
In hindsight, we probably would have had a great close-up view where we were (extremely close!), or at least on Route 6, but after meeting up with Jason and Dave again just south of Route 6, we made the choice to get more directly east of the meso and get a clearer view of the potential tornado with the magnificent structure. The worst part of that decision was the risk – not of danger but of the possibility of missing everything.
As the storm sucked in air from the south, blowing dust obscured the base so much that flying brown dirt was about all you could see until we got farther east. So while eyeing the radar and seeing tornado/funnel reports on SpotterNet, I yelled “We’re missing it!” as I drove behind Jason and Dave in our quest to get east and then north. Alethea had to put up with my crankiness.We missed perhaps 15 to 18 minutes of the tornado in progress, though I did get a snapshot out the window of the storm with a young tornado under it as we zoomed east. But what we saw from Olustee would be incredible as it continued for another half hour.
As we repositioned, we danced with lots of other chasers and research crews and mobile radars as they scrambled all over the grid of roads — mostly gravel, with rare paved options that Dave figured out — trying to find their viewpoint of choice. NSSL’s Low-Level Internal Flows in Tornadoes experiment (LIFT) got data around the storm with mobile radar and Doppler lidar. A Texas Tech mobile Doppler got data from within a mile of the tornado. And other research groups were on this tornado, too — the National Severe Storms Laboratory reported there were at least five mobile radars on the job, plus drones.
Yet as we buzzed into Olustee and beelined for the western edge of town, where we could clearly see a multivortex tornado in progress to the west, our group was alone for the moment. Well, alone with the townsfolk and a clear view over the Plains. It’s a rarity to view any storm these days in a quiet place without lots of storm chasers around you.
I pulled beyond and to the left of Jason and Dave, figuring I’d be out of the way, out of their direct line of sight, and they could always come forward a few steps. They both had the brilliant idea of photographing the storm with my car in the foreground, and the results were very cool – the CR-V appears tiny against the backdrop of the magnificent supercell.
The supercell looked like something out of a dream, thanks to dust and distance (5 miles?), and I made a choice in editing the photos to “dehaze” and bump up the clarity and contrast to bring out its features. It cycled from one tornadic shape to another – multivortex, cone, stovepipe, wedge – appearing to dissipate and reappearing again.
At one point, a second, smaller tornado was on the ground to the northwest of the main one. This satellite tornado damaged a home, the National Weather Service later found. Its preliminary rating was EF0.
A second tornado appeared behind the first. The satellite tornado damaged a house.
The National Weather Service issued continuous warnings of the tornado, first radar-indicated, then confirmed: “At 705 PM CDT, a confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado was located 6 miles north of Eldorado, moving east at 5 mph.” The tornado damaged several barns and at least half a dozen houses in Jackson County, but at least it wandered in a sparsely populated area, and I’ve found no reports of injuries.
While the damage was rated EF2, which the National Weather Service attributed to power poles being “snapped,” actual wind speeds recorded by mobile radars suggest the tornado’s winds could have been in the 180 mph range, or EF4, NSSL reported — IF wind speeds were used in ratings. Which they aren’t. Ratings on the Enhanced Fujita Scale are based on damage.
And this tornado was on the ground for 53 minutes, according to the National Weather Service summary, tracking across 15 miles, from 8 miles southwest of Duke, crossing north of Eldorado, and ending about 5 miles east-southeast of Duke. It grew to more than a mile wide at one point and was beautifully visible from our position on the west edge of Olustee, which was eventually included in the warning area. In fact, a local law enforcement officer came up to us shortly after we arrived, had a chat with Jason about what we were seeing, and headed off to sound the siren, which blared eerily as we filmed the tornado. I was concerned about the town lying in the path. Fortunately, the tornado headed in a northeasterly direction that took it away from the town.
As an aside, tornadoes usually become known by the town they’re closest to — or whatever catches on as folks report it later. I’ve heard this described as the Eldorado tornado, the Duke tornado, and the Olustee tornado, as it occurred between these three towns. While any of these are valid, I’ve been calling it the Eldorado tornado. I guess we’ll see what the scientists call it.
I was so stunned by the beauty of this tornado and supercell in stills that I focused almost entirely on still shots with my Nikon Z28. I should’ve at least pulled out a GoPro and stuck it on a tripod, or taken the extra minute to put out a DSLR in video mode. Instead I took very little video with the Z28, since I was using it to shoot stills, and shot video clips with my phone — sometimes shooting both at the same time. So the video could be steadier. I carry multiple tripods but didn’t get one out. Maybe I worried I’d miss something in the process. When it was all over, I was a little surprised to see how much video I’d shot.
At 7:33, the fat tornado looked more like a wedge. At one point it was more than a mile wide, according to the National Weather Service.
It’s not unusual for chasers to have regrets about chases. Things happen fast, adrenaline is flowing, and you make a lot of decisions in the moment. Dave and Jason wish they’d sent up their drones. My regret was that I didn’t pay more attention to video. Alethea shot the whole thing on video, and her footage is awesome. At least my GoPro was on the dash, and in spite of raindrops and the occasional windshield wiper and chaser cameo, or maybe because of those things, which give the video a naturalistic vibe, the footage is kinda cool. I’m including the timelapse in my video report.
One thing I’m glad about, despite my scatterbrained videography, is that I looked at the tornado with my eyes and not just the lens. “Just take your eye away from the camera for a second,” Dave told Jason, though it was a good reminder for all of us. “Remember.”
The storm seemed to exercise all its drama at once, and while we followed it for a while, it didn’t cycle up again into tornado mode. There was some really hot lightning that died down just after we found a place to shoot it. And then the chase was over.
I’m keen to see what’s learned from this storm, given all the research data and documentation by so many storm chasers. The tornado was probably in my top five, though I haven’t thought much yet about where I’d rank it. Just like I don’t actually count how many tornadoes I’ve seen. The ones that matter are the pretty ones I capture in a photo. And in this case, hundreds and hundreds of photos. It was truly an extraordinary storm chase.
The video is above, and in spite of my worries at the time, there’s quite a bit of tornado footage in it! To start a slide show with captions, click on any photo below.
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.
I adore Shattuck, Oklahoma’s windmill park, and photographing it with a storm was a dream.
We figured storms would fire in the eastern Panhandle of Texas, which they did, though by then we’d abandoned our initial target of Perryton and executed a big circle to get into western Oklahoma in favor of more maneuverability later. I had regrets for a few minutes, but road-wise, it was the best choice. We saw a sun halo, which I consider good luck; encountered a few ginormous tractor-trailers hauling wind turbine blades; and headed toward one of my favorite places in the Plains, the Shattuck Windmill Museum and Park in Shattuck, Oklahoma. It inspired a fictional one that makes an appearance in Funnel Vision, and it’s expanded a lot since I first encountered it. I was thrilled to photograph the windmills with a real storm behind them.
A happy bonus: There Alethea Kontis and I met up with other storm-chasing friends. Dave Lewison had joined Jason Persoff for the week, and Bill Hark arrived shortly afterward. We enjoyed the lightning, Jason got one of his trademark “groupie” photos of us, and we headed south to intercept the tail-end Charlie that began to dominate the line of storms moving into western Oklahoma. Some of my RadarScope screen shots show a lot of red dots, representing all the storm chasers pursuing this storm.
We stopped south of Roll on a tree-lined road on a hill, not ideal viewing unless you have a drone. Which both Dave and Jason and have. Still, we watched from this location for a bit, and then I was itching for a better view. So Alethea and I parted from the group. We didn’t mean to separate from them for long, but we’re all mature enough storm chasers that we have our own styles and often end up on different parts of the storm, uniting later in the day, if we’re lucky. And this day, we ended up on different parts of the storm with very different experiences.
Spinning supercell, with tree.
The light was incredible.
Our immediate shift in location took us just a bit more south, still in radio range. We stopped atop a big hill with a clear view, and oh! What a spectacular view it was! This storm was indeed a mothership, gnarly and layered and spinning, with a green heart, spitting out lightning. Absolutely magical. But all too soon, it began to overtake us. So we worked to stay ahead of it, driving through Hammon as the tornado sirens went off.
Dust that looked like vortices had me intrigued.
Here’s where we had strategic issues. We could have blasted through the precip (the hail?) and perhaps gotten into position to see the tornado east of Butler and west of Custer City. We got stuck behind a slow car, and our window was closing to go straight east. Interestingly, Dave and Jason got quite close to the storm’s area of business and didn’t see the tornado either.
It’s always worth stopping for a photo like this.
The number of storm chasers on the road makes me chase differently. I’ve never been one to play it super close, but I’m more willing to do so when I know my escape route won’t be jammed with five hundred chase vehicles. So I’m more likely to miss tornadoes on a day like this, when so many chasers surrounded the storm. The side benefit is that I get more structure shots, and I LOVE structure shots. And when I see a shot like this isolated, abandoned house with the layered supercell looming behind it, then I’ll stop (I almost didn’t, and then I remembered my rule: If you see a shot, stop and take it). I say “I” because I’m always the one driving while we’re actively chasing, and I do a lot of thinking with my wheels. That is, going in circles, as I briefly did here when I brought us back to this house so I could photograph it. I may do more editing on this photo later, but I love this image, which I captured as we dropped south, then east again.
We headed to the edge of the Foss Reservoir and looked northeast toward the storm. We were looking directly at it — probably at the tornado or at least where it would be, obscured by rain. I attempted to enhance a photo or two to bring out the storm’s features.
Here’s a map of our route and the tornado’s path.
Do the photos show the tornado? Or just a lowering with the tornado behind it? You had to be in just the right spot to see it clearly, and we were too far away and too far south to be in position. But even some people who were much closer, like Jason and Dave, didn’t see it either. The multivortex wedge tornado was encircled by a shaggy white collar cloud that would have further obscured it. This tornado caused damage to several buildings and was rated EF2.
Lightning just south of Taloga, Oklahoma.
From here, we headed a little farther east, captured the amazing layered storm structure, and finally gave up pursuing it so we could head north to get into position for the next day. Along the way, other storms popped, and we spent a few minutes capturing lightning, running into Bill again as we did so. All in all, this day offered a satisfying chase, thanks to its powerful supercell and a visual feast that made for wonderful photos.
Click on any image to start a slide show with captions.
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.
Monument Rocks in Kansas on May 13, 2024.
A cell drops virga on May 14 near Masterson, Texas.
So after a couple of days of photographing beautiful places like the South Dakota Badlands and Monument Rocks in Kansas, photographing virga (rain that doesn’t hit the ground) in Texas and exploring Shamrock, Texas (a visit worthy of another post), Alethea Kontis and I found ourselves plunging south beyond Midland on May 16, looking for storms.
A lot of other chasers were out, too, including our friend Daniel Shaw, whom we ran into on the road. It’s hard to miss his Rav4. And, as usual, there were tour groups, too.
I got initiated into storm chasing on the late, great Cloud 9 Tours in 1997. And I know what it’s like. A good tour won’t sit out a marginal day. So even on the iffy days like May 16, there are going to be lots of chasers on the road. There were no traffic jams where we were, though, especially since there were no obvious tornadoes. That night, a wicked storm roared through Houston, but there was no way we were driving that far east anyway.
The setting sun created dramatic rays of light May 16 in south Texas.
In spite of the so-so setup, we were rewarded with a truly beautiful shelf cloud that reenergized me after several days of tough slogging. Any chase day when I can take a good picture isn’t a day wasted. And this one more than delivered.
Click on any photo to start a slide show.
The west view toward the moon in Badlands National Park with pink, red and green Northern Lights.
Exclamation points. I know. In two blog headlines in a row. But this was one of those moments that totally deserved exclamation points — May 10 in Kansas and May 11 in South Dakota, where Alethea Kontis and I photographed the Northern Lights. I’m including the video in both posts because it’s fabulous and I don’t want you to miss it! (Exclamation point.)
All the driving had us plumb tuckered, to be honest. We’d chased storms for a couple of days around central Texas in less than ideal territory with less than stellar results, then booked it all the way north to the Hill City area of Kansas to shoot the aurora. We stayed up very late to do so. But the temptation to seize one more night of the geomagnetic storm was strong, and if we could do it in the beautiful Badlands National Park, wouldn’t that be even better? Especially when the skies were more likely to be clear there.
We stayed at a motel/RV park just outside Badlands National Park, giving us easy access.
It was a gamble, as all storm chasing is, but we decided to take the risk. Worst case, we’d see lots of lovely country and visit Wall Drug. I drove us up through Nebraska on a blue highway over gorgeous rolling hills with hardly another car in sight. It was an exquisite afternoon. And I had high hopes of good weather in South Dakota, which were realized as the low clouds on the horizon behaved themselves.
We stayed in a motel/RV park right on the edge of Badlands National Park, making access ridiculously easy. We went in before sunset to scout out a shooting spot — other photographers were already staking their claims — and set up to capture the aurora.
The good and bad thing about our spot was that a major park road was nearby. Bad: Headlights sometimes shot into our eyes as cars rounded the curves or overexposed an image. Good: Sometimes the headlights lit up the peaks in the rocks, making the foreground even more dramatic. You can see this effect in at least one photo I’ve shared here.
The burst of color didn’t last long, but it was dramatic. And what a landscape!
It took a while to get going, and the best of the aurora lasted maybe forty minutes, but it was stunning. And then the moon set and the Milky Way rose and we were awash in stars, probably the most I’ve ever seen at once. We waited a while, dozing a bit in the car, but when the aurora seemed to be asleep, we thought we maybe should be too. Or at least we needed a comfort break. So we drove the few minutes back to the hotel, and Alethea retired for the night.
I thought I saw a persistent hint of aurora on the horizon (wishful thinking?), and I went back out, picking a different spot, in hopes of capturing the Milky Way with the aurora. It was after 3 a.m., and all was quiet in my chosen perch, with the rocks surrounding me like a moonscape.
The Milky Way glowed, but the aurora colors from earlier were barely hints in the sky. Still, a pulsing green beam of light — very faint, so I had to adjust my settings to capture it — crossed swords with the strip of star systems in spectacular fashion. What I could barely see with the eye looked like science fiction in the lens. A friend later suggested it might have been a proton aurora.
By the time I got back to the hotel, there was a different glow on the horizon: hints of pending dawn.
I could faintly see a pulse of light; a longer exposure with a higher ISO revealed this green “beam.” And so many stars.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience … so far. I hope to get to Iceland or Norway or another northern viewing spot soon while the sun is still in an active period so I can see the vivid colors of the aurora with my eyes and not just the camera.
As far as chasing goes, this was one of the best chases of the trip by far.
Roll over images to see captions, or better yet, click one to start a slide show of larger photos.
While the prospect of storms was marginal during the first week of our storm chasing trip, we found ourselves tempted by another type of storm: the powerful magnetic storm predicted for May 10, 2024. I’d never seen the Northern Lights, and it was a bucket list item for me and for Alethea. We were pretty far south in Texas after our chase from the day before, but after looking at the cloud forecast, I figured we could get to a decent viewing spot in northern Kansas. So we drove. As we do.
I suggested an area west of Hill City in northern Kansas, anticipating few clouds and not many lights to interfere with our viewing. The viewing conditions were close to perfect. My only regret was that it didn’t get darker sooner, especially as I saw the amazing shots coming out of Europe.
Someday soon, I want to go farther north — i.e. Iceland or Norway — to see the Northern Lights in their full glory. While we could see the shape of the glows and rays and hints of color, it took long exposures with the camera to see the truly bright colors. I didn’t know the proper terminology, and what I called columns and ribbons were probably rays and arcs. Did it matter? No. The show was absolutely spectacular, and even before darkness was complete, the pink rays were visible to my naked eye.
Our first perch was a farm road in a grid we’d scouted before dark, with a gnarly old tree in the foreground. There were power lines to our south, but I figured that didn’t matter, since I fully expected all the aurora to be to our north. Wrong! The lights flowed overhead and behind us as well, with some of the best colors around 10 p.m. CDT. I removed some of the power lines later in editing so the full glory of the aurora filled the frame without those annoying distractions.
Fantastic colors manifest in the Northern Lights. This is the view looking east.
We then moved to a hill in the same area, even farther from the small settlements nearby, with no power lines in any direction (a rarity in the Plains; when I’m seeking good spots for photos, I’m always whining and joking, “Why do you need all this electricity?”). At this point the aurora was more tame, but there were still beautiful colors.
Tired, we finally booked a hotel on I-70, but we hadn’t gone far before I caught a new glow in the corner of my eye. I told Alethea I thought it was going off again, and we pulled into another farm road, facing north. There was no fancy foreground, though I loved the dirt road stretching north into the curtains of light as the aurora exploded again. My best shots from this wave were after 1 a.m. CDT on May 11, and again, the aurora stretched overhead, even producing the corona effect.
Amazing arcs of green and rays of purple, red and pink at 1:54 a.m. Alethea is the blur in the foreground with her camera.
Check out the video showing both this show and the aurora from the following night, when we took a chance and headed to Badlands National Park in South Dakota. You can see the Badlands aurora photos here — with the addition of the spectacular Milky Way.
Roll over images to see captions, or get the full experience and click one to start a slide show of larger photos.
Beautiful color above and below, near Llano, Texas.
That more or less sums up our chases on May 8 and 9, 2024, as Alethea and I wandered in central Texas. We got a few pretty photos anyway, but I was frustrated. Still, maybe the video will make you chuckle.
Roll over images to see captions, or click on any image to start a slide show.
The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma is one of my favorite stops when we have a break during storm chasing. To have a break on the second day of chasing didn’t bode all that well, but who cares? Prairie dogs always cheer me up.
So I was really sad to hear that my favorite prairie dog colony had vanished. (See the adorable 2022 video here.) A woman at the information desk at the visitor center told me that they could have up and moved overnight, especially if they didn’t feel safe (not surprising given the yahoos we saw throwing food at them and making lots of noise when we visited two years ago), or they could have been felled by disease. I prefer to imagine them packing their tiny suitcases and making a run for it. We did see prairie dogs elsewhere in the park, but they were farther away and more skittish. Alas.
We found some prairie dogs, but not where they were before. That colony has vanished.
Still, this is a beautiful place and well worth a visit. We didn’t even go to the top of Mount Scott this time, just a favorite overlook and other easily accessible areas, and we had a fun close encounter with a mini herd of bison who trekked right by my car. And the wildflowers were fabulous.
Here are a few photos from our visit May 7. Roll over any one to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.
Even when you set aside a month in which your window for chasing storms seems flexible and endless, you can miss stuff, and boy, did we miss stuff the week before we headed to the Plains for the 2024 chase. It didn’t help that I had work obligations and my chase co-pilot Alethea Kontis made a whirlwind trip to South Korea. And thus we missed a week of epic tornadoes. But May 6 looked promising, so we headed out from Florida to catch the action — even if it looked like the action would die off soon afterward.
The Storm Prediction Center’s “high risk” outlook inspired dread.
They weren’t exactly wrong. There were tornadoes, including one before dark, wrapped in rain, that some storm chasers saw. But most of the tornadoes were after dark, including a terrible one in the Bartlesville area. Yet this wasn’t a day of many rampaging tornadoes, fortunately for Oklahoma, and we didn’t see one.
While we looked at pretty features, we were out of position on a tornado that formed farther northeast.
That doesn’t mean we weren’t concerned about the day as it began, as you can see in the video. But instead of a high-stress chase, what we got was classic rotating storms forming on the dryline in the Texas Panhandle and pushing into Oklahoma. They weren’t moving all that fast, and we had a satisfying chase as we observed pretty convection and tried to pick the right cell. And after dark, we were treated to a beautiful lightning show.
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.
I keep hearing blogs are dead, unless they’re so full of searchable content that they’re not. Mine has been quiet for a while, and there are reasons for that.
While I occasionally opine about writing and I love to share my photos, I mostly use the Sky Diary blog as a kind of archive so I can remember and relive my storm chases over the years. But real life often gets in the way of my record-keeping. I still have a bunch of old files on my legacy storm-chasing site that haven’t migrated over here yet. And 2023 – well, I managed to post just one of my Tornado Alley chases with Alethea Kontis from last year DURING last year.
A lightning-filled, highly structured supercell on May 25, 2023, in New Mexico.
Part of the issue is that when you’re chasing, you’re driving. And driving. And driving. And maybe eating subpar snacks and forecasting a little. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a few hours of sleep after dumping all my photo cards each night and backing everything up. It takes forever. And when I get home, I have to catch up with reality all over again.
So on the eve of chasing storms in 2024 — after missing a historic outbreak — I thought it might be time to catch up on my storm reports a bit. I’ll be posting a few fantastic 2023 chases under 2023 in the blog sequence (backdating them). Feel free to browse and see what you might find. The first one is up: a dazzling lightning-producing storm in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.What have I been doing, if I’m so slow to post my chase photos? One, I have a day job editing books and creating book covers. Two, I’ve thrown almost all of my “extra” energy into writing new mysteries under my pen name and trying to grow the audience for those. Three, hubby and I are occasionally traveling now that the worst of the pandemic is over, and four, I have family obligations that take a bite out of my schedule.
And we have crazy dogs. Did I mention dogs?
Storm chasing has been a long and twisty road. It’s changed. So have I. As life gets more complicated, why do I keep doing it?
I remember a time when I dreamed of integrating storm chasing into every part of my life, of being in the inner circle, of “making the grade” and earning some kind of gold star of recognition. I felt like I had something to prove, I guess. I haven’t fully achieved any of those things, for good reasons, it turns out, one of them being that sometimes those shiny things are worth less than you think.
But I chase. And storms did work their way into much of my life, elevating my photography and inspiring my Storm Seekers Series of novels. Storm chasing is a huge part of my identity still.
Visiting another roadside attraction with Alethea and Dorothy.
And now I have a life on the East Coast that means I’ll probably never live just a few hours’ drive from targets in the Alley, which means I’m going to continue to miss huge events like last week’s tornadoes unless I can somehow afford to — or desire to — shed a lot of the other things I do.
At this point — 2024 marks my 28th season — I’ve missed way more events than I’ve caught. But I’ve caught some incredible ones.
A hard lesson to learn if you’re really obsessed with storms is that you will NOT see everything. Sometimes you’ll even be on the right storm and not see the tornado, and it hurts. I still sting over some of my misses, but life is short, and you have to decide if you want to balance other priorities with the thrill of chasing.
Caveat: “Thrill” is not a great word to use, because it’s associated with an adrenaline rush, with courting danger, with “zero metering” (getting into a tornado, which I’ll never do intentionally). Adrenaline happens, of course, and so do mistakes, but the thrill for me is capturing nature’s spectacles along with the freedom of roving the country and going wherever the weather is. Seeing old friends is a huge part of chasing for me, too. And if I can capture beautiful structure, I don’t even care that much if I don’t see the tornado.
Mammatus with a low-precipitation supercell at Earth, Texas, May 16, 2021. We missed the tornado, but I didn’t really care when I saw this.
Video has been totally devalued, so “getting the shot” is more for my satisfaction than for my occasional video sales (I’m not averse to sales, mind you!). And now YouTube has stripped monetization from my videos because I don’t get enough traffic. Not that I ever earned much. So I’m still trying to fund my passion, fund the art – sell photos (you can see some at Stolen Butter Gallery), sell books, and share beautiful things that people like. (You can Buy Me a Coffee with the links on this site if you enjoy my content.)
The road beckons.
Given chasing is rarely a fortune-making endeavor, it comes down to: Why do I chase? Still?
The wonder. The satisfaction of nailing a forecast. The exploration. I mentioned the freedom. And photography still drives me when I chase storms. My sensibility has evolved from a journalistic viewpoint to more of an artistic one.
When you’re “running and gunning” with stills and video, there’s extra challenge to framing a meaningful shot. Sometimes you just want to document the moment. And that’s OK. But when an opportunity presents itself to say more, you have to recognize it and take it.
That artistic quest, finding meaning in the moment, will never stop challenging me. And it’s another reason I keep going back to Tornado Alley.
Keep up with our chases on my Sky Diary page and on social media. Follow me on YouTube, Instagram, and the Funnel Vision page on Facebook.