Was thinking about this on my drive home yesterday while keeping pace with a lone supercell along I-70 in Kansas. How does this year pan out for me? It's definitely not my worst, but it's no where near the best. What it lacks is that one day that makes a season, something I kinda live by in terms of what I think makes a good season. I have no one single tornado day I can point back to and be like, "yes, that was the day". But I kept my "seeing a tornado every year since 2003 streak alive", which is kinda cool. I do have two memorable tornadoes on the year.
May 6, 2019 north of Lewis, Kansas... I snagged a photo (not a video still) of a lightning illuminated tornado with an impressive debris cloud on a 1/2-second handheld exposure after I was taking lightning pictures and a cone suddenly showed up. That was a first for me, and the photo was pretty badass.
May 26, 2019 near Sheridan Lake, Colorado... I had high hopes for this day, and as a whole it didn't pan out. I pretty much straddled the CO/KS border all day, trying to get on storms in Colorado and follow them into Kansas. None really produced. Eventually I got in with the conga line near Cheyenne Wells as the parade of chasers was coming north on US-385. Given the storm we were all on was moving into colder air, I opted to head south as I was going to position on the storms in southwest Kansas. Enroute, within 30 minutes of every chasers in the free world having gone through that area, I dumb-lucked into an impressive tornado crossing US-385. I ran with this as I am the likely the ONLY chaser, if not the only PERSON, in the world to have seen this. A feat in this day in age which I imagine is nearly impossible.
Those were two of only five tornadoes I can lay claim to, all of them in the month of May. Both the two above were not the most impressive of tornadoes, but each having a very unique story and bragging rights made them pretty special in an otherwise lower-end year for me.
Outside of tornadoes, I snagged one of my best storm/lightning photos ever. That came on the same night a couple hours before the Lewis tornado I photographed above. This was a stationary storm that I think I watched in nearly the same area for almost five hours (it ultimately produced the nighttime tornado). It was one of my first photos to go viral.
June started slow, mostly due to the amount of work I was covering, thus my time to get out was limited. But mid-June, I freed up and showed off why I am nicknamed "Hailboy". In the last 8 days, I have been in the midst of three very impressive hailers, two here in Kansas and one here in Colorado.
Speaking of Colorado, I made it a point in my second year here in Kansas to take some time off to enjoy non-work chasing, and I was able to get a few days in back in my Meteorological home with my good friend, Ed. The June 20 chase was pretty low-key, but offered up another one of my favorite photos of the year, this actually being pulled from video timelapse I was shooting of my Nikon near Last Chance.
The following day included one of the more incredible "almost tornado" intercepts of my career when we were basically on the back edge of a very intense area of rotation coming out of Elbert, Colorado. Had it produced, we would've had a front row-center seat to an incredibly high contrast tornado. It did not produce, but that 30 minutes included some amazing experiences, including watching RFD destroy trees up the road in front of us. Later that day on that storm, we got into the core near Matheson and got pummeled by hail up to 2-inches with baseballs not too far north of us. My trip home from Colorado yesterday included a perfectly routed supercell along I-70 from eastern Colorado all the way to I-135 that I was able to keep up with, stopping numerous times to photograph, before eventually getting cored in Ellsworth under the cover of a carport with more 2-inch hail coming down. The spikey hail in Lindsborg where I ended my chase was also pretty damn cool.
The season to this point (as of yesterday) has included a total of 22 chase events mixed between work outings, serious chases, and general storm tracking. I've seen 5 tornadoes and documented hail as big as 2.25" measured. Most of my time has been here in Kansas as work would obviously dictate, and I sat out several higher end chases for a variety of reasons. The biggest screw up day was by far May 28th as I let work dictate too much my target for the day, a lesson learned.
As for miles, I am sitting on 7,808 to this point, one of my lowest season miles to this point in quite some time. Living here in Kansas, and working for a Kansas-based station keep me close, and that's definitely good for avoiding burn out. I definitely find that I like being home more and not being on the road for weeks on end. It does make for later nights than one would think as I am constantly driving home as opposed to staying out, but it's nice to sleep in my own bed. For my career, I am currently at 377,611 miles.
I will remember a lot of things about this season, most of which cannot be documented in video or photos. I have two very unique tornadoes to brag about this year, and I got more than my share of hail, shot a ton of video that has been all over TV, and have gotten better with my photos, and have a few amazing shots I am particularly proud of. What this season lacked for me, again was the "one tornado that makes a season" (a Bowdle, Bennington, Aurora, Canton, etc). Also lacked that one good evening of lightning photography as most of the storms I chased didn't offer and the really good ones seemed to be on days I wasn't out.
Fortunately, my season is likely not over, living in Kansas has its perks. But the brunt of it certainly is, and the question remains whether I will go my first season under 10K miles since the early 2000s. I am mostly content with this season, and getting a chance to free-style chase in Colorado last weekend on my own without the obligations that come with a paycheck, did wonders for my storm chasing soul. I will definitely be building in such time off in the future as the mid/late June chasing is a nice way to end a stressful season.
Grateful as always that I get to do this with the regularity that I can, and certainly more so that I get to be at home in my own bed most nights during the thick of the season. I do hope that we get a return to a more traditional season here next year. This year did seem very grungy, not as photogenic, and kinda oddly paced. There was a ton of flooding and rain, and it really added an extra layer of difficulty to getting good imagery. That I do wish would've improved, was the quality of storms as a whole. But I think I managed to make pretty good from what I was offered, so I will take it and run.
