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: big-budget entertainment. The film’s science stretches credulity, and the actions of the storm chasers seem unlikely at best, but it’s always fun to watch Hollywood’s take on your life’s passion. The tornadoes looked better than they did in Twister, and I appreciated the inside references to our hobby and the original movie. Yet I think I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the geeks of Twister.

When I wrote my novels about storm chasers, the books’ quirky, obsessed characters were at least as important to me as the action. I’ve felt a need to revisit the books given all of the chaser stuff appearing in media lately.

Everything I write means something to me, but these “books of my heart” still give me a thrill. They remind me there’s value, perhaps the ultimate value, in writing about something you love.

 

TWISTER, chasing and writing

 

I saw Twister before I ever went chasing, though I’d seen scientific storm chasers in documentaries and had a lifetime fascination with tornadoes. So Twister didn’t push me into storm chasing, but it reinforced my curiosity.

A random Internet search got me into Plains chasing for the first time when I discovered Cloud 9 Tours back in 1997. That experience sparked a lifelong love of storm chasing, led to hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, and fueled my photography and imagination, including my writing.

 

 

Chasing is seasonal, so it was never my job. For years, I worked in newspapers and occasionally toiled in fiction on the side. Like most writers, I suffered rejections that discouraged me for way too long. But my immersion into chasing culture compelled me to write a novel—which became more novels—about storm chasers.

That first novel was influenced by a lot of factors: my passion for chasing, obviously. What I learned in creative writing classes in college, which had a strong literary bias. And a compulsion to get inside these characters’ heads.

First novels sometimes come with baggage as writers find their way. Funnel Vision wasn’t my first novel (my unpublished novels likely will remain so), but it became the first I published and then the first in a series. If I wrote it today, it would probably be very different. I’ve since learned that if you think you might write a series, start as you mean to continue. Conceptualize. Plan. Write more than one book before you publish. Plot a few books out, even if you don’t nail all the details.

 

Funnel Vision has several storm-chasing action sequences, including a page-turning chase that takes up most of the last third of the novel. But there’s also lyrical scene-setting and serious stuff, including a shock and a lot of emotion—it is, shall we say, a little more literary than books two and three. As in the other books, there are romantic elements, with a couple of steamy scenes, though it’s not a romance, either.

Judy, the heroine of the first novel, is a photographer who chases for art and therapy after surviving a tornado that hit her town when she was a child. The main male character, tornado researcher Jack, is obsessive and impulsive, and it takes him three books to figure out his life. They’re part of an ensemble cast.

Funnel Vision is wildly cross-genre. And cross-genre books are really hard to market.

Ignoring conventional genres was just one of the “mistakes” I made when I decided to self-publish, but I was a newbie at indie publishing. I didn’t know that books that fit neatly into a category sold better. Or that those books should have clearly defined genre covers that looked a lot like other books in their category. (I changed the covers later.)

And I didn’t realize that action-adventure wasn’t a very popular category to begin with. These days, there are a lot of erotic romance books with weird AI covers polluting the category on Amazon. (I have no problem with erotic books with AI covers, but they shouldn’t be in action-adventure. I know. I digress.)

Truthfully? I didn’t care about writing to market, even though I tried to find the right niche for the books. I have a passion for these stories, and I wanted to write them regardless of their marketability.

After a bunch of agent rejections for Funnel Vision, a fallow period after my mother’s death, and the rise of indie publishing, I revised it one more time and launched it into the world in 2012. Indie publishing experts fondly refer to this era as The Gold Rush. It wasn’t golden for me, as I published one book a year for three years and didn’t sell all that many. But it was satisfying to have the books out there—and a bit terrifying as well.

 

 

A second look, ten years later

 

The books became a series, and they evolved. Sometimes I think Funnel Vision is almost a prequel, for the reasons cited earlier, though any of the books can be read on their own. Tornado Pinball and Zap Bang continue the stories of Jack and some of the other characters, and they are assuredly adventure novels, though they still have characters with issues and a few steamy scenes and an often humorous, satirical bent.

They also have driving plots that would totally work as a movie. In Tornado Pinball, my hero acts as a consultant to a TV crew trying to launch a human tornado probe as a rival chaser complicates their quest. In Zap Bang, he and a badass pilot—a woman and war veteran—are drawn into a dangerous lightning study even as they’re drawn to each other.

 

And since I’ve been thinking about fiction starring storm chasers and my own books, I just did something I’ve been longing to do for a while—another read of these novels, with a light edit. I was relieved to find that I still love them.

Why a light edit, and what does that mean?

A little history: I started my newspaper career as a copy editor. (Or as some style guides would have it now, copyeditor.) I transitioned into reporting. And when I wrote the books, I was still working in AP Style. I learned best practices for fiction that served me well when I left newspapers and eventually began editing books as my day job.

Now I use Chicago Manual of Style (with a few quirks—that’s a privilege of indie publishing) and Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary as my standards. So the light edit ensured the books meet current standards. I polished a sentence here and there, but I refrained from a rewrite. And I tweaked a few of the outdated tech and other references that might’ve pulled readers out of the story, without changing the plot or timeline.

As I say in the notes at the back of Funnel Vision, it will always be a product of its time. But a few subtle changes make it more timeless. At least for the next few years! If you download the Storm Seekers Series ebooks or order the paperbacks, you’ll get the most up-to-date versions.

 

Authenticity in writing (and marketing)

 

There’s been a lot of tornado-rich fiction on big and small screens—and some in books—in the years since Twister, from the cheesy awesomeness of the Sharknado franchise and other bad TV movies to more earnest attempts like Supercell. (Which has a character named Zane, as do I. Huh.)

It’s hard for storytellers to resist the eternal conflict of human vs. nature, ramped up to F5 levels (or EF5, for the weather geeks). The sometimes ludicrous scripts of disaster movies probably shape what readers expect of books with storms in them. But I appreciate stories that get at least some of it right.

I think readers who loved Twisters might enjoy novels written by an actual storm chaser. Of course they’re fiction. The characters are fictional. The research projects and TV stunts are fictional. But the stories are authentic.

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity, which has become kind of a buzzword in marketing that often translates to “go on social media and show the real you.” Which is hard if you’re a private person. I think authenticity means a lot of things—not just an authentic presence but, in writing, authentic details and emotions and, especially, an authentic voice.

I am my writing. But my writing is several different things, and I like writing in multiple genres.

 

In a New York Times interview, mega-bestseller Colleen Hoover, who writes in several genres and has a massive TikTok following, said, “I kept being told that authors need to brand themselves as one thing. And I was like, well, why can’t I brand myself as everything? Why can’t I just brand myself as Colleen Hoover?”

I don’t expect to get anywhere near her sales level, but I like the way she thinks.

I’ve been writing mysteries under a pen name, Lucy Lakestone, which I kept on the down-low for a while, partly because Lucy’s first series was steamy romance. I wasn’t sure people who knew Chris Kridler the Journalist/Storm Chaser were ready for that. Eventually I realized that hardly anyone cares.

Then I (well, Lucy) started the Bohemia Bartenders Mysteries, which are funny mysteries I call quasi-cozy. What does that mean? Cozy mysteries are usually set in a closed environment like a small town; my bartenders travel. Cozies tend to be tame, curse-free, with violence off the page and no sex. My mysteries teeter right on the edge of the category. They have occasional cursing, they hint at heat but don’t show anything explicit on the page, and there’s always action and danger. So calling them “quasi-cozy” in every book description is my way of saying, hey, these defy genre expectations, and you’ve been warned.

You’d think I would’ve learned my lesson with the storm chasing books when it comes to writing to market and fitting into a genre. But life is short, and while I want to make a living, I also want to write books that mean a lot to me, pigeonholes be damned. I know some people do both. I’m working on it. But with my time getting shorter, I’m committed to writing authentic stories I care about.

Writing is hard. And publishing can be brutal. I have friends who are killing it. Others are struggling to break even, break out. The quality of a book doesn’t necessarily determine its success in a flooded market.

I have a long way to go before I declare myself a success. The big question is, what is success to you? And is the struggle worth it? If I’m going to work this hard at the dream, I want to love what I write.

If you care about what you write, your passion will show through, as long as your skills match your enthusiasm. While it helps to write something you love that also fits into a marketable category, I hope your joy comes first.

“If you’re just chasing the algorithm,” Mal Cooper of The Writing Wives said in a recent video, “… you’re losing your authenticity and you’re just shifting toward the mean. You’re making the most average thing that you can. That’s what the algorithm is looking for, right? It’s looking for the most average thing that’s going to appeal to the largest group of people, and you’re going to sacrifice your authenticity when you do that. So that thing that actually makes you unique and interesting and have a draw is the very thing you get rid of when you chase the algorithm. So that’s why I’m not a fan of doing that. I’m a fan of being out there and honest and real about yourself and your stories and your marketing.”

I love this philosophy. My books aren’t for everybody. Heck, no one’s book is for everybody, and if you’re selling yours like it is, you’re missing the point. I’m looking for the readers who get it.

If I write any more Storm Seekers books, they’ll be authentic, as they always have been. And for me, the storm chaser who can’t get enough stories about twisters, the experience will be a whole lot of fun.

 

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Thanks to The Writing Wives for permission to quote from the video on achieving success; they also offer a free workbook if you want to check it out.

Learn more about Chris Kridler’s Storm Seekers Series.

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 nights ago (in July!).

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!

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.

SPC cited a “complex surface pattern” in issuing the Slight Risk of severe storms that included western Oklahoma, with storm potential near the dryline, where dry air to the southwest meets the moist air to the east. This sentence in their discussion made me smile: “Considered adding [a] small ENH [enhanced risk] to western OK, but there wasn’t sufficient confidence on where to place it.” And we didn’t start in quite the right spot.

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!

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

We dropped south and found a farm road with a beautiful view, though by now the storm was more HP — high-precipitation — obscuring the features under it. And boy, were there a lot of features! And it was really hard to tell what was going on. No tornado was confirmed in this area, but there were moments when I thought there might have been ground circulation. There were peculiar columns of red-earth dust that might have been vortices. There was a lot of dust anyway, which didn’t help our visiblity. And before we repositioned east again, it had what seemed to be a big wall cloud, at least for a few minutes.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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 accompany them. Dates in the subheads are the dates of journal entries, not necessarily events.

The highlight of this account is the May 12 hail barrage and tornado at South Plains, Texas.

May 6: Colby, Kansas

It’s been a long day, and tomorrow there’s a long drive ahead, so I’ll make this short. I drove west this afternoon from Hays to Goodland, Kansas, to get some data. My initial target was southwest Nebraska, with the thought that storms might form in eastern Colorado, just west of Goodland, and move northeast. It turns out the dryline was right there, and a few cumulus clouds were starting to bubble. The one that bubbled the most ended up being the storm I chased all day, right out of Goodland and up into Nebraska. It didn’t move fast, and despite wall clouds and a tornado warning, I didn’t see a tornado – though I did see a very well-formed scudnado (looks like one, but isn’t) that fooled me for a minute. Maybe someone in another position did see one, but the storm was rolling over a terrible road network, and I spent a lot of the day trying to pick the least muddy gravel road to traverse.

The best part of the day may have been the sunset, which shot yellow light over the rolling hills at the Kansas-Nebraska border and pulled a brilliant double rainbow out of the rain in the eastern sky, the full arch. Fantastic.

May 9: Manhattan, Kansas

It’s a quiet day in Kansas after a couple of fun storm chases. The night of May 6, I met up with the crew I chased with last year (Scott McPartland, Pete Ventre and Dave Lewison; and Mark Robinson, Dave Sills and a Toronto Star reporter), and on May 7, we set out for Kearney, Nebraska (joined by Dave Patrick and Kristy Randall of Ontario). That was our initial target, anyway.

We were almost there when storms started going off on the dryline to our west. We turned around and cruised back down the Interstate to intercept as the cells hauled north. They were pretty, even tornado-warned, but we didn’t see any tornadoes. By this time, cells were blossoming to our east, and back we went again, toward our original target in the better air, caught at one railroad crossing after another. Just west of Kearney, after another train went by, we made a right turn and saw a big, dark lowering under a tornado-warned cell. I was on the phone with hubby George at the time. “I have to call you back!” I said. We had a four-car caravan, and everyone figured we saw a tornaodo. Subsequent reviews of the tape and other reports appear to confirm it — but if you have to think about it too much, it wasn’t that great of a sighting.

The day actually got better from there. North of Grand Island, there was redevelopment on the back end of the storm, and we caught some pretty towers going up with scudding clouds in the inflow that the inexperienced might call a funnel. Meanwhile, there were plenty of the inexperienced around. All the locals were out for a chase. While we were filming the cell, a guy in a truck stopped in the middle of the road to tell us he’d just filmed a 20-minute tornado.

“Want to see it?” he said. “Not right now,” we told him. Um, we’re kinda busy, you know? Meanwhile, Mark Robinson’s car is a magnet for yahoos. It’s got about a zillion antennas, an anemometer, flashing lights, glaring decals. Scott McPartland’s car isn’t quite as obvious, but it also has a lot of gear on the roof and decals, along with a hail shield that Dave Lewison helped him build. Dave Patrick’s truck also has gear and a big lightning picture in the back window. So cars were following us all day … even into the network of muddy farm roads we then entered.

The roads were gravel and dirt, not too bad before it rained. But cells were passing through the area, including the ones we were chasing. We stopped on a hill and filmed a pretty orange sunset and a cell carved out by a rear-flank downdraft. Again, no tornado. I guess it was boring for the tagalongs as we hung out and took pictures, so they took off. I suggested we get moving before it got dark, because my Honda Element wasn’t thrilled with the roads.

As we got going, dusk was falling, and a new line of storms was headed for us. I noticed a young man walking along the road. He had a desperate expression and appeared to try to flag me down. I radioed Mark, who said they’d seen him, too. We decided to stop and see if we could help.

May I just say, “Duh.” This was a carload of Grand Island locals, five young guys, who said they were following the storm and got lost. No, they were following US and got lost – and then slid their car into a ditch. We couldn’t even drive down the road they went down. A few of our guys walked into the lowering darkness to see if they could help push it out. They tried, unsuccessfully, while the cells got closer. Dave L.’s WxWorx satellite data showed “shear markers” in the storms, signs of rotation.

“We have to go NOW!” half our crew was shouting to the other half, who were down the hill in the dark, trying to get the car out. We ended up rearranging our passengers and carrying the five guys to the nearest town, Fullerton. Their car was left behind. Wicked storms trained over that area all evening … the car was probably door-deep in mud by the time it was over. We didn’t go back to find out.

South of Fullerton, we stopped and enjoyed a fantastic, strobing lightning show from the line of storms. It was like flash bulbs constantly going off, little sparks shooting through the clouds. We took lots of pictures and video, including shots of each other in front of the light show, a prairie Vegas.

May 8, we started out in Grand Island and headed east and south. We saw lots of storms, but nothing significant, except for a brief, well-formed funnel south of Washington, Kansas.

When it all merged into a fast-moving line, we got ahead enough to enjoy the “whale’s mouth” appearance, a roiling cathedral ceiling tumbling over itself, glowing with blue light. Then, for once, we had a relatively early night and grazed at the Sirloin Stockade in Manhattan, Kansas, for dinner.

Things should pick up tomorrow and might be really interesting Wednesday. It’s a matter of powerful dynamics coming together in a favorable way. Today, well, we might go see that crazy big ball of twine again.

 

 

May 13: Amarillo, Texas

Amarillo, Texas, is where I’m holed up while Band-Aids are put on my car after a good thrashing by hail yesterday (May 12). But let me backtrack a bit.

I was going to tell you about our stop in Cawker City, Kansas, a few days ago, when we actually got to add twine to the world’s largest ball of twine. Yes, the twine I added is now part of history, and I was pretty giddy with the excitement! And then I was going to tell you about a couple of subsequent chases … a powerful supercell in Nebraska that came painfully close to producing a tornado, but was mostly a fest of dusty spinups before becoming a stacked-plate behemoth after dark; and a frustrating Kansas chase that left us behind the storms in Nebraska and too far ahead of them in southwest Kansas – a day redeemed only by some nice lightning.

But instead of going on about all that, I’ll tell you about May 12.

 

Highway to hail, 2005 edition

The May 12 South Plains tornado and hail barrage

May 12 is turning out to be a pretty significant day for me. Last year, I was with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland and Pete Ventre that day, just east of the house destroyed by a tornado in Attica, Kansas. This year, I was with them, and Dave Patrick and Kristy Randall, in the Texas panhandle when everything went crazy. (Mark Robinson and Dave Sills had decided to chase in Kansas on their way home to Ontario.)

We started the day in Garden City, Kansas (where I stayed in the Best Western’s Presidential Suite for the single rate – Jacuzzi and everything!), and even though we knew we had what could be an impossible drive ahead of us, we decided Lubbock, Texas, was a good target. If anything went up along the front along the way, we could consider going after it.

It’s almost a magical feeling, coming out from under the cold side of a weather front. Most of us don’t think about that kind of thing in our everyday lives, but when you know that there’s a boundary between two air masses, and you drive hundreds of miles to get from one side to the other, you’re very conscious of the vast changes going on around you. First, it was cloudy and cold, then eerily foggy. Then, it was suddenly warmer, with clearer skies above, and we saw the anvil of a tasty storm coming out of Plainview. Dave L. was able to track its growth using the WxWorx system that draws radar data from the XM satellites.

At a gas station, we ran into Tim Samaras and his pumped-up truck, loaded with off-road gear from a corporate sponsor. Some of you might have seen Tim featured on “National Geographic.” He’s a very nice guy. We said hello, and he told us to be careful. I think of that with irony now. (Of course, Tim deploys probes in the paths of tornadoes.)

So we got into the Panhandle, into the blocky, hilly geography of the Caprock, then west into the flatter areas of Quitaque and Silverton, and went south on 207. The first storm looked pretty good, and it formed a spinning wall cloud and rear-flank downdraft and looked like it was about to produce a tornado. It didn’t, but it was dropping baseball-size hail on chasers who tried to get north of it.

We decided to chase the southern storm, which looked promising visually and on radar. It followed about the same path. We went down a muddy farm road a little ways, but not far enough to get into trouble, and watched it evolve. This one’s downdraft kicked up dust, including distinct tornado-like spinups, and its wall cloud had some serious rotation. Our party was separated by a short distance on the farm road, but we all headed out toward the paved north-south road at about the same time to stay ahead of it.
As I started to drive south a bit farther, hoping to get south of it, it began to form a funnel.

Like almost everyone else – and there were a lot of chasers around, including tour groups – I pulled off to get some video and pictures. I realized there was big hail somewhere in there, but I also realized that I didn’t want to cross the road in front of it. There are a lot of “ifs” you consider later – if I’d kept going, I might have avoided the big hail, though I’d have no tornado video. Or if I’d kept going, I might have been munched by a huge tornado. In all, taking chances with the hail is probably smarter, though not much. (I suppose staying home is smartest.)

 

Anyway, the tornado formed a beautiful white cone with a brown debris cloud flying around its base. It thickened, with condensation swirling in spirals around it, then darkened and grew as it got closer to the road.

It crossed, with a huge, dusty circulation under the dark cylinder of the tornado. Dave L. warned over the radio from Scott’s car that we had to get out of there to avoid the big hail. But there was a big problem: The tornado had felled power poles, which were lying across the road. There might have been a way to squeak around, but by then we were in serious wind, rain and hail on the outer edges of the circulation, and then the big stuff started falling.)

This was one of those “lie back and think of England” moments, when you just have to resign yourself to the ravishing to follow. It’s like what they say about people on airplanes who know they’re going to crash – they don’t generally panic. And I had been through something like this before, in 2001. I naively thought this couldn’t get much worse.

It was. In 2001, my CR-V was hit by mostly golf balls and a few baseballs. This was mostly baseballs and a few softballs and grapefruits. It sounded like bowling balls were slamming into my roof. With some of those impacts, the entire car shook and the covers on my ceiling lights actually fell off. I was starting to worry that stones were going to come through.

My windshield was whacked multiple times, with each impact creating a spectacular spider-web smash. A few little bits of glass fell onto the dash, but it held. Then I noticed I was getting hit by tiny bits of hail and rain. I couldn’t figure it out. Then I looked back. The side window in the back on my side was smashed in. I climbed back and stuffed a pillow in the hole to keep the worst of the stuff out. When the worst seemed to be over, we picked our way around the fallen power poles and headed south to get out of the precipitation and assess the damage. (And my pillow was lost along the way. I loved that pillow.)

So, in brief, the damage was … the two windows; a smashed-out taillight; huge dents that look like the product of a beating with a baseball bat; cracked plastic here and there; and my wounded psyche. At least that metal hail shield I’d ordered built for the sunroof was rock-solid. I can’t even imagine being in a storm like that with an unprotected glass sunroof. My car really would have been a hail-catcher (I talk about turning it into one sometimes; I’d have to armor it first).

 

One of Scott’s hail shields flew off. He had them for every window, but he lost a side window because he lost the shield. The chicken-wire hail shield he and Dave L. built to hang over the windshield preserved the window but had huge, bowl-like indentations in it from the hail strikes. Scott’s car also had body damage. So did Dave Patrick’s truck, and his windshield was hosed, too.

A lot of other chasers were caught. We ran into Cloud 9 Tours afterward. One of their side windows was blown out.

“Was there screaming in the van?” I asked.

“I was screaming,” a tourist from Liverpool said.

I don’t blame him.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

As the video title says, sometimes storm chasing isn’t pretty. Stuff happens. You lose cellular data. You get out of position. You get more out of position when the road turns into a one-way construction zone where a guy with a portable stop sign holds you hostage for twenty minutes while you wait for a pilot car. Add in murky skies, sight-blocking hills and trees, and few or bad roads, and the experience can be less than ideal.

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.

 

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.