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On the last day of our 2023 chase in the Plains, Alethea Kontis and I headed back to New Mexico for one more try. We watched clouds bubble up from infancy to make pretty little storms west of Tatum before abandoning those for a severe storm near Portales. It was rotating but not serious about doing anything, and soon the storms started to merge.

 

We booked east into Texas, trying to stay ahead of them – and then to get a view as a large arcus cloud formed. It wasn’t a layered shelf cloud, but it was dramatic, filling the sky.

After photographing an eerie orange sunset under a bank of dark purple clouds, we dropped to I-10, where the intensifying storms laid down a barrage of lightning bolts. The timelapse video is pretty darn cool. From there, it was south to Fort Stockton, chasing lightning all the way, with a final stop at the town’s road runner statue. In all, it was an epic end to our voyage to Tornado Alley.

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Our chase season has been the domain of New Mexico, no doubt about it. And today we explored the arid southeast corner of the state and the adjacent area of Texas, which was a lot less arid as the day went on thanks to flooding.

We skipped from Kermit, Texas, up to Jal, New Mexico, watching developing clouds while knowing the better chance of a tornado was farther south. We just didn’t have the heart to chase in that territory and took our chances. And the storm we followed came pretty close. It had a rotating wall cloud as it crossed the highway, and then it enrobed itself in rain and hail and moved east into an area with no roads at all. So much for that.

 

So we repositioned east and filmed beautiful if linear storms and, eventually, a rainbow after driving through the flooded town of Seminole, Texas. Even on marginal days like this, it’s satisfying to see the sky at work.

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May 26 and 27 continued the theme of 2023: storm chasing in New Mexico. Specifically, chasing in and out and around Clovis, whose radar site was unfortunately down.

Alethea Kontis and I met up with Jason Persoff and saw pretty but unambitious storms on May 26 that petered out early. May 27 was more promising and brought us around in multiple circles as we chased rotating supercells. It was really a beautiful day of desert and flood and spectacular skies, as the video shows. We made a couple of stops by a gorgeous old church in Taiban that one chaser after another visited to get a few shots.

 
We also had to ford a flooded road, which was tested by some guys in a much bigger vehicle than ours, and then Jason, before we took the plunge, so to speak. The water wasn’t moving, and we got through it with no trouble. In an area with a lot more roads, we might not have tried it. But given the huge distances one had to drive in any detour, going through seemed the best option.

So with spinning storms and spinning chasers, we dizzily ended the day with a pretty sunset and a few lightning bolts. And I had to get a few shots of The Big Lebowski murals on the walls of the Clovis bowling alley. Dude!

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Sometimes small chances lead to big payoffs when storm chasing – like the gorgeous, lightning-filled spinning supercell Alethea Kontis and I caught in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.

We’d seen a beautiful, dusty supercell the previous day and ended up in Amarillo. We headed west toward New Mexico, not expecting much, and played around in the strip of cool vintage Retro 66 landmarks in Tucumcari. Tee Pee Curios is amazing and filled with wonderful goodies.

Speaking for myself, I was out of practice in the Chaser Patience department. We considered giving up, though I wanted to hedge our bets and stop and do some timelapses of the clouds just east of the Texas border.

The sky was gorgeous, and finally, storms initiated in the Land of Enchantment. So it was back over the border, where we were greeted by a towering anvil filled with mammatus over one of a couple of storms that had formed. As afternoon turned to evening, one became spectacularly dominant, a layered, spinning supercell spitting out almost constant lightning. The video is absolutely magical.

The bad news: Wind blew over my tripod with one of my Nikons on board, damaging my favorite wide-angle lens. I’d had the 12-24mm for years and didn’t realize that night that it wasn’t working correctly after its plummet to the earth, so I had issues with soft focus on the later photos I took of the supercell. Drat! I’m writing this almost a year later; the lens has been replaced. But the rest of the trip meant being very judicious about focusing if I used that lens, or I just used another lens.

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It took a while for Alethea Kontis and I to “pull the trigger” on this year’s storm-chasing trip. That’s what my chaser friends who don’t live in Tornado Alley say when they’re planning to hit the road. For most of us, with jobs and families and other things that keep us busy, we can’t do a lot of spur-of-the-moment thousand-mile trips. It’s better to block out a week or two and maximize our time on the road.

 
The pattern didn’t look fantastic, but I thought there was potential around the periphery of the ridge. And we were rewarded with many beautiful storms, all of which I will eventually post on the blog. This was the first one we chased, on May 24, starting eastern New Mexico and working its way east into Texas after dark.

We saw the potential even as we left Florida, and I was determined that we would chase this day if we could get there. It was a long haul, and we got on the storms a bit late, so our position wasn’t great to see the tornado our friend Jason Persoff saw. And a later tornado was seen by chasers who didn’t mind driving into the heart of the beast. I don’t have much stomach for core-chasing, so we stayed back and were treated to gorgeous, dramatic structure.

 

The storm turned into a dust-eating UFO after dark as it moved into the Texas Panhandle, and we got hypnotic lightning shots and timelapses before the chase was done.

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On some chases, you get the bear. And on other chases, the bear gets you.

You could say Alethea Kontis and I got the bear on May 30 as we chased in New Mexico with Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland. We were northeast of Clayton, and the guys got ahead of us as I spotted a critter climbing on a power pole. It appeared to be a young bear, and despite its blond hair, a young black bear. For safety, we stayed in the car as we stopped and filmed the bear for a few minutes. And because we were in the car, I tried to use my phone to film it, so my pictures kind of stink. (Theme of the day.)

By the time we decided to move on, we damn near missed the tornado. So in this sense, the bear kind of got us.

Scott and Dave had stayed with the storm, watching it develop. We pulled up on a dirt road next to them just as they were about to move closer to the developing tornado. We quickly turned around and resumed heading north. We spotted the fleeting tornado, and I got only a glimpse on my wide-angle GoPro dash cam, resulting in – yes – another crappy image when I cropped it later. And unfortunately, we missed better tornadoes that occurred to our east that we were simply unreachable once we got into this area of almost no roads.

We got almost under the rotation, amid ground-scraping clouds and under the threat of hail, which we escaped by heading east. After that, the day was pretty much a car wash. But it was interesting. I’d never seen a bear while chasing storms before!

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How perfect to chase a supercell that looked like an alien invader in Roswell, New Mexico.

On May 28, Alethea Kontis and I hit the road in Childress, Texas, with Jason Persoff, Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland. Our first target was the Midland area, but it looked as if the target was shifting south into tough chase territory (rugged hills). And even if Midland had remained the most likely target, the frustrating construction nightmare had us changing direction and heading for eastern New Mexico.

This choice illustrates a typical chaser’s dilemma: Go for the more likely tornado, which may not be that easy to catch or see if it happens because of territory or congestion, or chase the more visible, accessible storms. These days, with so many chasers on the road, I really like secondary targets. And even though we didn’t see a tornado, I am thrilled with what we saw in New Mexico.

 

We were already behind the eight-ball by the time we neared Roswell, with ongoing rotating storms emerging from the higher elevations. Yet we were greeted by an eerie sight – blowing dust, gustnadoes from a dying storm to the north, strange green light and a beast of a supercell in front of us. It was like driving into a sci-fi movie.

 

The storm was full of hail, and Scott and Dave went ahead in their well-shielded car as we dropped south. Except a big hailstone bounced off their hail shield and took out a side mirror. The rest of us hung back but still got into some fun smaller hail and took photos of baseball-size hailstones we found by the side of the road. The trees in that area were shredded by the bombardment.

 

Finally, we saw multiple funnel clouds and were treated to an insanely orange sunset and a double rainbow. The chase concluded with beautiful lightning amid the mammatus at Artesia. And Alethea and I made one more stop on our way back to Roswell for the night, capturing spectacular stars above the retreating lightning storms.

Not bad for a roundabout 559-mile chase.

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Back in 2001, when I’d been chasing storms for just a few years, Dave Lewison and I met up with Scott Blair and Jason Politte on May 30 and headed into northeast New Mexico in pursuit of supercells. We found one that formed on the high plains. There were cold temperatures aloft and the perfect ingredients for rock-hard hail. We knew the storm was producing this hail – we could see it, falling from the cloud like a white waterfall – and we were determined to get ahead of it.

Even now, chasers get caught by hail. Hell, some chasers rush into it. But back in the days of no in-car radar data, when we’d “go visual” to figure out where to be in relation to the storm, it was even easier to screw up. And boy, did we screw up. We got on I-40 and were caught by the storm just inside the Texas Panhandle, with no exits or shelter in sight. Our cars were bombed by sideways-blowing hail for about ten minutes, including stones up to baseball size. To this day, I avoid chasing storms on Interstates because of this experience. See more pictures and a thorough account of this chase in the 2001 storm chasing report.

I’ve posted a new edit of the video from this day. Be warned: THERE IS CURSING. This was also way before everyone was shooting in high-def. And listening to my angst makes me cringe a bit. But because of this experience, I kept my cool when I got into an even worse hailstorm on May 12, 2005. You might say I’ve become a bit hail-avoidant since then.

March 20 brought severe storms to Florida, so my friend Alethea Kontis and I headed out for a shakedown cruise of my new storm-chasing data setup. Unfortunately, we were chasing in the Orlando area, so we saw a lot more red lights, strip malls and trees than we did storms – but we did get a nice view of a tornado-warned cell on the west side of Orlando. See photos from the chase here.

In the meantime, I’ve added a chase report to the 2017 files here. On May 22 of last year, I chased in New Mexico. The day ended with a gorgeous storm that is much better to describe in photos, not words.

Not long until May – and another chase in Tornado Alley!  Stay tuned.

On this storm chase on May 22, 2017, Kathy Velasquez and I targeted eastern New Mexico and were rewarded with pretty supercells. For the day’s finale, we ran into chaser Bill Hark and observed a spectacular sunset storm with mammatus and a rainbow.

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