We’re back from Tornado Alley! This trip with my storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis went all too quickly, even though it was two and a half weeks. I sometimes wish I had the freedom to chase for a couple of months at a time, as some chasers do, but I still have a day job (editing books) and a fun job (writing books) and a husband and dogs and a life at home. So I enjoy the trip, and then I look for lightning when I get back home to Florida.

We saw five or six tornadoes, but most of them were in the “murknadoes” category — far away or difficult to see. The best tornado photo I got was probably a shot of a skinny little thing in Missouri, where I’d never seen a tornado before. And why “or six”? The last one was so murky, it’s super hard to see in my video, even though I think it’s there. All of this is to illustrate why seeing tornadoes is not really the most important thing to me when I chase storms, though I’m still frustrated when I miss them. Especially because our chase crew missed a couple of really photogenic tornadic storms due to bad decisions or poor timing. That’s the way the weather works sometimes and the way chasing works as well. Regardless, we still found beautiful storms to photograph.

One of the best things about this season — my 29th — was getting together with good friends whom we’ve barely seen in the past few years. Chasing together was a huge amount of fun. We hit thirteen states and drove more than 9500 miles, so we packed in a lot of adventure.

Alethea and I did several video updates from the road. You can check them out in this YouTube playlist. I’ll be posting more pictures and videos as I go through everything. I certainly got a lot of photos, and I can’t wait to share them with you. Thanks again to everyone who gave so generously to our gas fund! Stay tuned for more reports as I process all the images.

 

 

The last chase of the trip is always bittersweet. And on May 29, 2025, it was also exciting, confounding, and incredibly dusty.

Alethea Kontis and I targeted an area south of Levelland, which is west of Lubbock, Texas. The first storms almost immediately looked like they would form a line, which often means less power and less chance of tornadoes.

 

Yet several short-lived tornadoes were reported with this dust monster – landspouts and otherwise – and with cameras we managed to see at least one of them. I say “at least” because in reviewing the footage later, it appears there are a couple more in my shots, but when you have to pore over your photos with a magnifying glass to be sure, the catch isn’t as satisfying.

We mostly stayed ahead of the dust, though we couldn’t help sampling some of it as screaming inflow winds carried the red earth of west Texas into the maw of the beast. This storm also was warned for baseball-size hail, so I was loath to drive into it.

 

At times it felt like we’d entered the Upside Down, given the eerie haze, the mysterious heart of the storm, and the strange colors in the sky.

We played tag with the clouds of dust and plenty of storm chasers all the way to I-20, where we headed east, staying ahead of the worst parts of the line of storms until it overtook us.

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With our friends gone home, Alethea and I began our storm chase May 28, 2025, with a stop at the Cimarron Heritage Center in Boise City, Oklahoma. This place has an interesting historical museum as well as a super-cool life-size metal sculpture of an apatosaurus named Cimmy, designed by artist Joe Barrington. It’s 65 feet long, the same size as a dinosaur whose bones were excavated in Cimarron County in the 1930s.

We shot some photos and video, then wandered north to shoot building clouds. We stopped again to see Cimmy as we rerouted to pursue storms in Kansas. One near Manter looked particularly promising, but construction forced us to do a detour – while the rotating storm put down what looked like a tornado. We never got close to it – it lifted first.

And then, with storms everywhere, it was time to reroute and try to catch convection in the Texas Panhandle. South we went through the Oklahoma Panhandle and then into Texas. We weren’t on the right side of a great shelf cloud some chasers saw, but we got on a rotating storm with a gorgeous updraft near Darrouzette.

 

We photographed this storm until until another munched up behind us, and then we abandoned them and headed north, stopping at the Oklahoma border to check out some more great lightning. It was a fun day pursuing a smorgasbord of storms.

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May 26, 2025, had Alethea Kontis and I chasing in west Texas, targeting an area south of San Angelo. Only issue was that a rotating storm was ongoing by the time we got there. We buzzed through the precip on the north side and dropped south, getting ahead of it at Menard.

On the south side of town, we stopped to watch a rapidly rotating wall cloud. But as the storm encroached on our position, we took into account the hordes of storm chasers and the hail core (a 5.87-inch hailstone was reported) and decided to back off for safety.

South we went again, but between the hills, the trees and the increasingly messy storm, we didn’t see much more structure. The sky was still beautiful, though, as we reached I-10 and gave up the chase for the day.

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Our storm chasing target on May 25, 2025, was the Texas Panhandle, which meant we were able to swing by one of my favorite Route 66 stops, the U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. Jason Persoff took the opportunity to shoot another “album cover” of our chase crew in front of the old gas station.

We continued south, expecting storms to go up early and line out early. But we were in for a treat – not one but two spinning supercells and an incredible lightning show.

We headed south and west out of Childress. Soon we were east of Matador along with a bunch of other chasers, watching a developing supercell to our west. Structure and radar indicated it had rotation, and it cranked up into monster mode. Hailstones up to 6 inches in diameter were reported with this storm!

 

We all got separated during the chase, which often happens, especially since Alethea and I tend to get farther out in front to capture the structure (and avoid the hordes and hail). We got some nice structure shots ahead of the storm, along with a few cows in the foreground. And I spotted what looked like a possible tornado near Afton, though we were quite distant from it – it was reported by another chaser. Yet even our friends who were closer weren’t sure of what they saw.

 

And in spite of our best intentions, we ended up in a slow-moving traffic jam anyway as the hail core munched toward us. We successfully evaded it after a few tense minutes and moved farther south to chase another storm near Stamford. This photogenic supercell prompted more tornado reports. There was certainly visible rotation from our position and, even more terrifying, some of the most intense lightning I’ve ever seen.

 

I stood outside the car for short time, shooting branchy cloud-to-ground bolts with no lightning trigger, using exposures of just under a second to maximize my chances. I caught several bolts before the rapid-fire barrage scared me enough to return to the car.

We stayed with the storm (or storms) for a while. Later, our party said goodbye to the northern chasers under lightning crawlers on an isolated road. What a way to end a spectacular day!

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After a disappointing chase the day before, our crew focused on a target in Oklahoma on May 24, 2025. We hung out in Seiling for a while, then moved on to a storm near Putnam.

It was a leisurely chase as we caught up to the storm and watched it develop. The sun shot out beams behind the updraft. But as the storm wasn’t doing much and the sun was setting, we aimed for another one near Strong City.

This storm was a lively lightning producer, and it was fun grabbing a couple of time-lapses as I shot stills. Check out the video. I love a chase day that ends with a good lightning storm.

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We got a few good photos on May 23. Normally that’s enough to make me happy with a chase. But our crew’s chase into Colorado was sharply painful after unfortunate choices had us missing two tornadoes.

We knew our northern target was the most promising for tornadoes, but it was a haul, and getting there in time would be nearly impossible. Then we were tempted by the nice storms going up farther south, and we stopped in Kirk to check them out.

 

The issue, of course, is that the storms moving into Colorado from Wyoming were pretty far away, and a tornado occurred in our original target area while we were looking at the storms farther south. Members of our crew liked the idea that the storm might produce again, as cyclic supercells often do. Though I worried as we left behind the increasingly beautiful cluster of storms.

The northern storm was still spinning but weakening by the time we arrived. It had nice structure, but it became clear it wasn’t going to produce another tornado.

We turned around, but we were too late again. The storms to the south produced a tornado. We’d missed both and still had hours to drive to our Kansas hotel for the night. It was an 800-mile-plus day for very little return.

 

Chasing is like that sometimes, but it can be frustrating. I try to learn lessons. One is the same one I’ve heard for years – never leave a rotating storm. Another is: Listen to your little voice.

I’d also like to learn how to fail with grace, but as I said in our chase update the next day with Alethea, I’m still working on it. Failure is a big part of storm chasing. And it’s good to remember that even a bad day chasing is a good day.

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Are there good-luck foods when we chase storms? Alethea and I like to toast with the cheese rounds I make and bring from home. But I also think Texas-shaped waffles are fun, at the very least, and I love a good Allsup’s burrito to fuel the chase. We had both of these on May 22, 2025. And a very lucky storm.

With our chaser friends — Jason Persoff, Scott McPartland, Dave Lewison and George Kourounis — we headed to an area west of Dallas, Texas, and caught up to an unassuming storm that soon began to spin. It was a bit frothy-looking at first, but soon it developed a mini mothership appearance, and the striations and stacked plates became smoother and more pronounced as the day wore on.

We got fantastic pictures with the sun shooting out rays behind the storm when we stopped on the northeast side of Possum Kingdom Lake. Then we had to circumnavigate the LP, or low-precipitation, supercell, catching up to it at Palo Pinto.

This amazing spinning supercell and a profusion of colorful wildflowers made for a visual feast and one of the most beautiful chases of our trip.

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The best part about chasing, especially when the storms let you down, is hanging out with friends. By May 19, 2025, Alethea and I had met up with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, George Kourounis and Jason Persoff. After a yummy barbecue lunch in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, we headed south toward the Red River, where a storm headed over the border into Texas, dumping huge hail along the way.

 

We avoided the hail and ended up getting our best views from behind the storm as it moved west. A spectacular anvil with pouchy mammatus caught the sunset light, so we stopped near athletic fields in Ardmore to get some shots.

The puddles offered a great opportunity for reflective photography as the colors got more dramatic. Then they shifted and changed and became more muted as the sun sank below the horizon and the storm moved off to the east. The nice sunset photos were our consolation prize after a somewhat frustrating chase.

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Maybe I should have taken the pancake printer as an omen.

The pancake printer is just one of many breakfast phenomena one encounters in Tornado Alley hotels, and it’s probably better than the make-your-own-waffle machines in terms of safety and mess. But waffle machines can do shapes, and I have yet to see a pancake in the shape of Texas.

Still, I named a fictional Kansas town Pancake in my Storm Seekers novels. And southern Kansas was where our troupe headed first on May 18, 2025, positioning ourselves between two storm targets. Which, my friends, is almost always an error – or at least it is if you hang out too long, waiting for things to happen, leaving you far from both targets should one of them fire.

 

But we did have fun at the Casey’s in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where lots of storm chasers had gathered. There were so many amusing cars and cool license plates (see the video). It was a major chaser convergence.

Finally, when a nice storm formed along the dryline southwest of us in Oklahoma, we went after it, but we were already too late. It spawned a tornado we didn’t see, then weakened.

Still, it had lovely structure at sunset, and I got a couple of decent photos, which I consider the mark of a good day. It might not have been a great one, but that’s the way storm chasing rolls sometimes.

To start a slide show of the photos, click on any one below.