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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.

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Even when you set aside a month in which your window for chasing storms seems flexible and endless, you can miss stuff, and boy, did we miss stuff the week before we headed to the Plains for the 2024 chase. It didn’t help that I had work obligations and my chase co-pilot Alethea Kontis made a whirlwind trip to South Korea. And thus we missed a week of epic tornadoes. But May 6 looked promising, so we headed out from Florida to catch the action — even if it looked like the action would die off soon afterward.

I’m writing this later, so I can say we totally redeemed the season as we extended our trip into a third week. But there were ups and downs, and it all started with an ominous forecast on May 6 for Oklahoma. As the Storm Prediction Center summarized its “high risk” outlook, “A regional outbreak of severe weather with multiple intense (EF3+), long-tracked tornadoes, as well as very large hail and severe thunderstorm gusts, is expected over parts of the south-central Plains from this afternoon through evening.”

They weren’t exactly wrong. There were tornadoes, including one before dark, wrapped in rain, that some storm chasers saw. But most of the tornadoes were after dark, including a terrible one in the Bartlesville area. Yet this wasn’t a day of many rampaging tornadoes, fortunately for Oklahoma, and we didn’t see one.

 

That doesn’t mean we weren’t concerned about the day as it began, as you can see in the video. But instead of a high-stress chase, what we got was classic rotating storms forming on the dryline in the Texas Panhandle and pushing into Oklahoma. They weren’t moving all that fast, and we had a satisfying chase as we observed pretty convection and tried to pick the right cell. And after dark, we were treated to a beautiful lightning show.

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I keep hearing blogs are dead, unless they’re so full of searchable content that they’re not. Mine has been quiet for a while, and there are reasons for that.

While I occasionally opine about writing and I love to share my photos, I mostly use the Sky Diary blog as a kind of archive so I can remember and relive my storm chases over the years. But real life often gets in the way of my record-keeping. I still have a bunch of old files on my legacy storm-chasing site that haven’t migrated over here yet. And 2023 – well, I managed to post just one of my Tornado Alley chases with Alethea Kontis from last year DURING last year.

 

Part of the issue is that when you’re chasing, you’re driving. And driving. And driving. And maybe eating subpar snacks and forecasting a little. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a few hours of sleep after dumping all my photo cards each night and backing everything up. It takes forever. And when I get home, I have to catch up with reality all over again.

So on the eve of chasing storms in 2024 — after missing a historic outbreak — I thought it might be time to catch up on my storm reports a bit. I’ll be posting a few fantastic 2023 chases under 2023 in the blog sequence (backdating them). Feel free to browse and see what you might find. The first one is up: a dazzling lightning-producing storm in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.

What have I been doing, if I’m so slow to post my chase photos? One, I have a day job editing books and creating book covers. Two, I’ve thrown almost all of my “extra” energy into writing new mysteries under my pen name and trying to grow the audience for those. Three, hubby and I are occasionally traveling now that the worst of the pandemic is over, and four, I have family obligations that take a bite out of my schedule.

And we have crazy dogs. Did I mention dogs?

Storm chasing has been a long and twisty road. It’s changed. So have I. As life gets more complicated, why do I keep doing it?

Perspective after almost three decades of chasing

I remember a time when I dreamed of integrating storm chasing into every part of my life, of being in the inner circle, of “making the grade” and earning some kind of gold star of recognition. I felt like I had something to prove, I guess. I haven’t fully achieved any of those things, for good reasons, it turns out, one of them being that sometimes those shiny things are worth less than you think.

But I chase. And storms did work their way into much of my life, elevating my photography and inspiring my Storm Seekers Series of novels. Storm chasing is a huge part of my identity still.

Back when I got hooked on chasing, I applied for jobs in Tornado Alley, which would have been a big move for me as a lifetime East Coaster. In the end, I compromised and took a job in Florida, figuring at least there’d be lightning storms. But I still had a “real job” in newspapers, and I wasn’t willing to make the sacrifices some chasers make — going into significant debt, living in their cars. I mean, I am IMPRESSED by that dedication. I just don’t have the constitution to endure the hardships. And there’s so much life to taste, to quote a song. I want to chase storms and do a lot more before my time runs out.

And now I have a life on the East Coast that means I’ll probably never live just a few hours’ drive from targets in the Alley, which means I’m going to continue to miss huge events like last week’s tornadoes unless I can somehow afford to — or desire to — shed a lot of the other things I do.

At this point — 2024 marks my 28th season — I’ve missed way more events than I’ve caught. But I’ve caught some incredible ones.

A hard lesson to learn if you’re really obsessed with storms is that you will NOT see everything. Sometimes you’ll even be on the right storm and not see the tornado, and it hurts. I still sting over some of my misses, but life is short, and you have to decide if you want to balance other priorities with the thrill of chasing.

Caveat: “Thrill” is not a great word to use, because it’s associated with an adrenaline rush, with courting danger, with “zero metering” (getting into a tornado, which I’ll never do intentionally). Adrenaline happens, of course, and so do mistakes, but the thrill for me is capturing nature’s spectacles along with the freedom of roving the country and going wherever the weather is. Seeing old friends is a huge part of chasing for me, too. And if I can capture beautiful structure, I don’t even care that much if I don’t see the tornado.

 

The sky still calls, and so does the art

Video has been totally devalued, so “getting the shot” is more for my satisfaction than for my occasional video sales (I’m not averse to sales, mind you!). And now YouTube has stripped monetization from my videos because I don’t get enough traffic. Not that I ever earned much. So I’m still trying to fund my passion, fund the art – sell photos (you can see some at Stolen Butter Gallery), sell books, and share beautiful things that people like. (You can Buy Me a Coffee with the links on this site if you enjoy my content.)

Some people say content is free, but you have to be able to afford to make it, or the only thing we’ll see is reductive AI iterations of storms and stories. And who wants that? So the struggle goes on.

Given chasing is rarely a fortune-making endeavor, it comes down to: Why do I chase? Still?

The wonder. The satisfaction of nailing a forecast. The exploration. I mentioned the freedom. And photography still drives me when I chase storms. My sensibility has evolved from a journalistic viewpoint to more of an artistic one.

When you’re “running and gunning” with stills and video, there’s extra challenge to framing a meaningful shot. Sometimes you just want to document the moment. And that’s OK. But when an opportunity presents itself to say more, you have to recognize it and take it.

That artistic quest, finding meaning in the moment, will never stop challenging me. And it’s another reason I keep going back to Tornado Alley.

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Keep up with our chases on my Sky Diary page and on social media. Follow me on YouTube, Instagram, and the Funnel Vision page on Facebook.

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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Maybe it was a longing to chase in more “traditional” parts of Tornado Alley after so much time in New Mexico, or just to spend a little time in Kansas, but we drove on up through Kansas from Liberal to southern Nebraska to chase a pretty little low-precipitation storm on May 29, 2023.

 

It wasn’t much. But the scenery was beautiful, and the cows were amusing. And we’re hard-core, I guess!

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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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It’s been almost a year since the May 23, 2022, chase in Texas that was both awesome and maddening. Alethea Kontis and I were on the storm of the day from the moment it was a piddly shower. But the wrong move put us on the wrong side of a wall of dust that obscured a massive, violent tornado.

This is the one storm from 2022 that I didn’t post last year as I worked through all of my photos … maybe because it was so epic. Or maybe because we didn’t see exactly what we wanted to see.

 
We hung out in Muleshoe, first, and learned a bit about mules (see the video). Then we saw a sun halo, one of many we saw in 2022. We weren’t sure if we should take it as a good sign, however, given how weak our chase trip had been thus far. But we targeted Morton – later the site of the wedge tornado – and not far from there, eyed a growing but unimpressive supercell. When it appeared a dusty outflow boundary would overtake the storm, it seemed like it might be in trouble. Even though in the back of my mind, I thought of Florida’s outflow boundaries and how they can make a storm spin up a tornado, I couldn’t imagine what followed. Jason Persoff (with whom we’d met up) and Alethea and I began a repositioning maneuver in the wrong direction, and then the storm went nuts.

This time we moved with the dust back toward the storm. And I confess, I wasn’t ready to dive-bomb into the core to see what was on the other side. What was clear is that there was a big tornado in there, but we didn’t have the fantastic view the chasers who hung out among the falling giant hailstones had. Yet we did have a view of the monster. As the power lines sang an eerie tune in the inflow winds, we watched it get closer and decided to see if we could get into a position where we had a view of the supercell’s base. And maybe a tornado.

We approached the dramatic stacked layers of the dusty beast, got almost under it and saw – more dust. And a dark shape in the dust. Given how the dust swept around the notch and chased us down the road – not to mention the radar signature – I feel certain we saw a tornado in there. Barely.

We bailed on the conga line of storm chasers – so many chasers – and dropped south to get a tremendous view of the stacked supercell. My favorite image of this I call “Texas Skyscraper,” and it’s available at Stolen Butter Gallery.

After Alethea had to get medieval on the sovereign of a local gas station to let us fill up – they were trying to close because of the storm, even though they were safely out of the path and we were running on fumes – we pursued the cell into its lightning phase. It was very difficult to keep up, and eventually we let it slip off into the darkness, a wild runaway in the night.

 

Some chasers had close calls that went along with their fantastic view of this storm. Check out Pecos Hank Schyma’s harrowing video. I’ve done a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking in the wake of this chase, but it’s hard to come up with a perfect scenario even if I could relive the day.

This storm pretty much wrapped up our 2022 chase season. At least it was a real storm – a powerful and visually stunning supercell. And if I look hard enough into my photos, I see the big tornado.

Now we’re about to head out to the Plains again, much later than usual given the quiet pattern in Tornado Alley. I’m not expecting much, but it will be great to be on the road again.

To get all the latest updates, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)

If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!

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