I believe I am not the only one: Photographers spend a lot of time thinking about what they could’ve done better. Storm chasing is much the same way. If I had access to a time machine, there are several tornado events I’d like to revisit, reshoot and re-experience. Of course, it helps when you know where things will happen and when.

Last night, or should I say early this morning, I had one of those moments when shooting a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of a Globalstar satellite.

Rocket launches are challenging. Pads change. Rockets change. Trajectories change. And even if you’re using an app or dead reckoning or whatever, it’s sometimes hard to predict exactly where the rocket will appear in your photo. I’m so impressed by the photographers who do the math and get a rocket crossing the moon. I’m just trying to figure out where it’s going to leave the horizon and how the arc of a time exposure at night will frame objects in the foreground.

I set up at Port Canaveral by Exploration Tower. My GoPro timelapse would include the tower; I planned for my still image, shot with a Nikon D500, not to include it. But I knew the industrial towers across the water might be a problem; the rocket would go up around there, and one of the towers might block the horizon where it lifted off. And that’s exactly what happened. I should’ve stayed in position to get the reflection I wanted, but at the last moment I dashed away a few feet to shoot the still image and basically didn’t get anything I wanted. Sigh. That said, here’s the image so you can judge for yourself.

Complicating matters, a lightning storm in the distance taunted me, but without two different exposures and compositing the images, I didn’t see a great way to get the launch and the lightning in my photo. I did get a couple of stills with just the storm, soft and dim over the port’s bright lights.

The video, on the other hand, is pretty darn cool. The lightning storm offshore to the north strobes as the port’s lights flicker and change color. Suddenly, with a brilliant burst of light, the rocket launches upward, sets the clouds aglow, then arcs as it continues toward orbit. The whole video is less than a minute. I love all the color and light.

And I’m already considering how to frame the next one.

Is it storm chasing when there are not actually storms to chase? I say yes. Especially when we wander around traditional chase territory in between the storms.

On May 22, we built our day around a visit to the U Drop Inn – the 1936 Conoco gas station that’s been beautifully restored in Shamrock, Texas. It’s a Route 66 landmark and inspired the garage in the movie “Cars.” In fact, we arrived the night before and got a few photos then. But when we planned to visit, it was Sunday, and Texas is closed on Sunday, apparently. I’ve been before but really wanted to visit the cafe, which is actually operating now.

Still, we saw a few other outdoor attractions in Shamrock (see the photos) before moving on. I had no idea an alleged piece of the Blarney Stone was here.

Moving on, we had a nice lunch in Wheeler, then went on to find the remote and desolate intersection in the Texas Panhandle where the last scene of “Cast Away” was filmed. This is where Tom Hanks’s character delivers the package he kept unopened while stranded on the desert island – a symbol of dedication and hope that leads him to promise for his future.

 

We did our best to channel Tom Hanks, and Alethea created a mini “Wilson” out of a rock, since no volleyballs were at hand. She left it there. If you find it, let us know! (Where is the “Cast Away” intersection? Near Mobeetie, Texas. Program 35°38’2.18″ N 100°27’4.99″ W into your map app.)

We also headed to Groom, Texas, perhaps best known for its giant cross. We focused on the leaning tower of Texas, aka the Britten water tower, which leans and balances on two legs thanks to the perfect amount of water in its tank. It was positioned this way to attract visitors to a truck stop that burned down long ago. You can read more on the excellent Atlas Obscura website.

Then it was on to The Big Texan in Amarillo, where we did not eat a “free” 72-ounce steak* … *dinner if eaten in one hour. That asterisk is on all the billboards. Look for it!

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I can look at prairie dogs forever. (You can probably tell from the video, which is five minutes of pure cute.) I find it so relaxing to watch them, plus they’re adorable. I had a great experience taking photos there last year, so when Alethea Kontis and I had a break in our slow storm-chasing season, we made a trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwest Oklahoma to visit their town again.

Prairie dogs eat plants and bugs and live in burrows. According to Wikipedia, members of the same family group “kiss” and groom one another. The babies spend their first six weeks underground and are fully grown in five months. We were lucky enough to catch young ones playing in the meadow.

They made a few sounds while I was there, but it was a very windy day, creating a lot of wind noise in the microphone, and in the face of a loud mansplaining tourist, several yelling kids, and droning motorcycles, I decided to minimize natural sound in the video and use music instead.

 
Of course, there’s more than prairie dogs at the refuge. There’s great scenery, bison and other animals. It’s well worth a visit.

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We saw beautiful atmospheric phenomena on May 20, but it was a minimalist storm chase. Still, it was atmospheric as only Texas can be.

First, it was seriously hot – 97F, not the kind of temperature you expect to be conducive to severe storms. We played around a cold front (not that cold) and dryline and followed clouds around with the kind of hope that only desperate storm chasers have. Storm chasers who, one might add, were here from somewhere else and so didn’t have quotidian distractions to prevent us from chasing.

This is the kind of chase day that’s a real reality check for the hardcore storm chaser. Not every day can produce tornadoes and photogenic supercells. Especially in 2022.

 
Alethea Kontis and I waited in Olney, Texas, for a while for a scant chance of storms, even sampling a frozen coffee drink at Hometown Coffee & Tea (it was excellent). Then we drove around in a triangular “circle” or two, passed a really cool “graveyard” of roadside signs and old cars and trucks, and ended up “chasing” a couple of storms until they died about an hour later. One was “severe” (today, pretty much everything had quotes around it). Let’s just say we were underwhelmed.

The sunset was beautiful, though, with a wavering orange sun sliding down behind wind turbines and power lines at Throckmorton as the sky lit up in orange and blue. We started the chase at an Allsup’s and ended up at one, with the feral cats sitting in judgment as we ate our burritos. Now that’s Texas storm chasing.

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We had one of the best storm chases of our trip on May 18, 2022, as we pursued a beautiful supercell through the Texas Panhandle from our starting point in Boise City, Oklahoma. We chose this starting point because we wanted to revisit Cimmy, the steel sculpture of an apatosaurus scaled to replicate a dinosaur dug up in Cimarron County.

As a bonus, there’s a 750-pound Tin Man out front. I appreciate any and all Oz references on the road.

For the first time, Alethea Kontis and I actually went inside the museum. One enters through what was once a unique house. The Cox House, now the Cimarron Heritage Center, was designed by Kansas architect Bruce Goff in 1949; behind it, the museum continues in a large add-on interior space and a massive backyard featuring historic structures. We didn’t have time to see it all, but since I dig mid-century architecture, I loved seeing the house.

The house’s clean mid-century sensibility is somewhat obscured by the clutter of museum artifacts now, but it’s fascinating. According to the museum’s interesting website, there are no conventional interior doors, just plastic accordion doors, and all the walls are concrete and brick, paneled in walnut.

A couple of items that caught my eye during our quick walk-through were Opal Cox’s amazing button collection and a peculiar horsehide coat; the original owner had it made from the hide of a favorite horse after it died.

Finally, we saw a storm forming in eastern New Mexico and headed southwest into the northwest Texas Panhandle to intercept it. This remote area had plenty of prairie dogs and lonely roads, which we enjoyed on a leisurely chase, keeping level with the evolving supercell as it moved south.

Near Vega, Texas, close to sunset, the storm was especially beautiful. Smoke from what was likely a lightning fire drifted under it as the setting sun lit the base and wind turbines churned in its path. The video alternates between music (during timelapse sequences) and natural sound because I wanted to convey the rich backdrop of wind, grinding turbines, birdsong and thunder.

Later, the storm showed some rotation, as you can see in the video, but it never got serious about going tornadic.

South of I-40, we followed the storm all the way to Hereford, though by this time, just as the structure was really getting nice, it outran us. We captured a little lightning and finally had to give up this very satisfying chase as the storm blasted us with dust in town.

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After Alethea and I took a little writing break during our slow storm season, we left South Dakota and headed south through Nebraska to intercept storms in northern Kansas. Of course, we saw a sun halo along the way. It’s been that kind of year.

And yes, it was a haul, and we were north of the storms when a landspout tornado occurred. We didn’t see it, but we got south of the line anyway and watched the storms develop. There wasn’t much in the way of rotation, but it was ELECTRICAL!

I took a lot of photos and video as the line of storms produced one lightning bolt after another. You can see almost continuous zappage in the “Kansas Zap Fest” video. And there’s a mix of Nikon stills and video grabs in the gallery. I do love the infinite variety and quirky behavior of each lightning bolt. #ZapBang!

Alethea Kontis and I took a few days in the middle of our storm-chasing trip for a mini writing retreat during the lull in storms. We found a neat little Airbnb in Lead, South Dakota. And since the night was clear on May 15, we figured we should check out the total lunar eclipse of the “flower moon.”

We found a spot high on a hill above a cemetery where we could see the full moon rise over the next ridge, above the trees and among the stars. We watched totality obscure the moon in a ruddy orange.

I did a simple wide-angle timelapse with one of my Nikon cameras. I wished I’d gotten out my Big Bertha lens and done a telephoto shot. Don’t photographers always think of what they should’ve done? Frankly, we had kind of a casual approach to the eclipse. We really just wanted to enjoy the event as it happened, and it was beautiful indeed.

Even when storms are scarce, the sky often delivers if you just look up.

May 14 started with an early trip to the Honda garage to see what all the alarms were about the day before and to get the traditional mid-storm-chasing-trip oil change.

Fortunately, a friend from my newspaper days and her beau picked up Alethea and me at the Honda dealership to take us on a fabulous tour of Rapid City, where we were followed by a sun halo. A gorgeous sun halo! The only time it left us was on Dinosaur Hill, a wonderfully bizarre WPA project of dinosaur sculptures built atop an impressive prospect.

We also visited the Chapel in the Hills, a replica of a structure built in Norway in the 1100s, and the Geology Museum at the South Dakota School of Mines. (More dinosaurs!)

I owe Gina and David double for this lovely day. The pleasant sightseeing helped temper the pain of the car bill, which included four new tires. Ouch. But no diagnosis of the CR-V’s sensing system issues.

Next stop after we picked up the car: the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Neither Alethea nor I had seen it. These days the grand memorial is fraught with baggage, as it’s carved out of mountains sacred to Native Americans.

My interest was more trivial. Since I’m a movie nut, I wanted to see it and get the North by Northwest vibe. (If you haven’t seen this Hitchcock movie, watch it right now! It’s pure fun.)

From a purely how-did-they-do-this perspective (or why did they do this?), Mount Rushmore is an impressive sight, made even more so by that magnificent sun halo that had been following us all day. I loved the photos I shot, and we did a silly little video from the viewing area.

We moved on to the Crazy Horse Memorial, a truly epic mountain sculpture in progress not far from Mount Rushmore.

The in-progress sculpture is accompanied by a visitor center and museum of seemingly endless rooms stuffed with artifacts of Native American history. The theme: dreamers. Because it’s going to take generations of dreamers to make this vision a reality.

Where’s all the storm chasing, you might ask? Well, we were asking the same thing, and that’s why we headed to Lead, S.D., for a mini writers’ retreat after a stop for dinner in Deadwood, which, as in days gone by, is overrun by gamblers and drinkers. Add tourists and bikers and bachelorette parties, and you get the vibe.

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Pure dedication led us to chase a messy setup on May 12, 2022, looking for the needle in a haystack, or the tornado in the mess. This was one of those hindsight-is-20/20 days. If I could go back in time, I’d position myself ahead of the line that formed and kicked up the dramatic haboob that swept through Sioux Falls. Certainly the potential was there in the forecast – a line of strong storms was expected, accompanied by high winds, and it was so dry, a haboob like this was possible. But Alethea Kontis, Jason Persoff and I wanted to see if we could find a tornado.

We headed to Redfield, South Dakota, and had lunch at a great old diner set in an even older bank building — hence the pun on the Leo’s Good Food sign, which says, “Family Dining You Can ‘Bank On.'” The salad bar was set up in the old bank vault.

We had a hearty lunch interrupted by the eerie sound of the tornado siren — I mean the CREEPIEST tornado siren I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard several. We checked our phones immediately, but as we thought, nothing was brewing yet, weatherwise. The other possibility was the fire department calling on its firefighters, and indeed, that’s why the siren sounded. But it gave us a weird feeling even as the locals kept eating like nothing was going on.

We said hello to several other storm chasers in the restaurant, then went to the south edge of town to watch the sky. We finally picked a storm amid the messy convection that went up, and it failed to do anything noteworthy. Though at least we got to say hi to Daniel Shaw on the side of the road, our only Dan sighting this season.

 

The next day, after breakfast with Jason, who headed home, Alethea and I visited Storybook Land and The Land of Oz in Aberdeen, South Dakota. This lovely attraction was not yet fully open for the season, but its outdoor features were, and it was full of groups of screaming children having fun.

I happily walked the yellow brick road and shot cool timelapses of the clouds before we headed west. (The video is transporting.)

We shopped for junque at Wall Drug — my first visit to this mega-emporium — then drove through Badlands National Park at sunset. And it was spectacular. Finally I understand what everyone is talking about. We hoped for a popup storm but didn’t get one. I need to go back.

 

We spent that night in Rapid City so we could get the car checked out the next day. The CR-V threw a bunch of warnings at us related to the cruise control and accident avoidance systems, or Honda Sensing, as it’s called. My theory was that the car freaked out in the extremely high winds on this otherwise fair-weather day, but I wanted to get it checked out even though the warnings eventually went away. It’s always something when you’re piling thousands of miles on the car during a storm chase.

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This year’s storm-chasing prospects were thin, at least while Alethea Kontis and I were in the Plains, so we had to follow the weather into unusual places. On this day, we started in Omaha, Nebraska, where generous friends of Alethea’s put us up for the night, and we crossed into Iowa and had lunch in Des Moines with fellow author Barbara Barrett. Only then did the chase begin.

We headed up into Minnesota first, decided not to tangle with Minneapolis, and got in the path of a fast-moving supercell near Cannon Falls. It was rotating and even had a brief lowering, but other than its abundant hail — which produced an eerie hail roar — it didn’t get its act together. And we had more problems: roads and rivers. We had to go way out of our way to cross the Mississippi River into Wisconsin, a lovely land full of trees and hills. And cheese, though I didn’t get to explore the dairyland, dang it.

We got on another tornado-warned storm that seemed unlikely to produce one and ended up in Eau Claire photographing lightning. A fun day … but a LOT of driving: 579 miles, to be exact. It was my first visit to Wisconsin, so that was kinda cool. And one of Alethea’s friends treated us to pizza at her fabulous Topper’s restaurant. Wisconsin cheese for the win!

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