2025 Chase Season Epilogue

[Mikaela Norris]

Your 'peak' experience is a moving goalpost, James.

This is something I discovered just last year in 2024. My personal peak moved several times throughout the season. At the beginning my peak was just seeing a supercellular tornado. Then it was seeing multiple tornadoes in a day. Then it became a very synergistic chase, where despite seeing no tornadoes, I felt perfectly in-tune with the supercell and had a road network that allowed me to move with it and see several cycles with several rotating wall clouds and funnels. Finally, my peak was seeing a wedge, being close enough to hear it roar, and ending with a front-lit, photogenic stovepipe phase (see my avatar photo). Despite ALL of those peaks, I still want more.

One thing I've noticed the younger chasers do (especially the YT chasers) that us older folk don't do is work together to help each other ensure success, whether it's forecasts, equipment or roadside support when someone incurs vehicle trouble. Most our age have chased in individual silos from what I can see, including me. Maybe someday we here on ST can work together in similar fashion to make chasing life easier for each other and bring up the collective success rate and possibly provide the extra motivation to make the effort to chase the not so obvious stuff. Just a thought.

You make a good point here about the current batch of youtube chasers working more collaboratively vs. previous generations of chasers. I'm sort of in between those 2 generations. I technically went on my first chase back in 2008, but life happened and I was never able to get out as much as I wanted to to build any success until the last 5 years or so. I just hit my mid-30s, so I feel like I'm just a bit too old now to really be counted amongst the younger generation, but I'm a bit too young and inexperienced to be considered a veteran chaser. My chase style has been greatly influenced by the styles of folks here on this forum, so I find myself chasing in an "individual silo" as well rather than collaborating with other chasers. Even when I would encounter other chasers out in the field, it never really goes beyond a brief chat on what we are thinking about the setup or storm at that time. There is a common meme phrase that floats around social media: "Born too soon to X, but born too late to Y." For me it looks sort of like "Born too soon to be a chase streamer, but born too late to sell photos and video." I really feel like that describes how I fit into the chaser generations.

 

[Sean Ramsey]

You make a good point here about the current batch of youtube chasers working more collaboratively vs. previous generations of chasers. I'm sort of in between those 2 generations. I technically went on my first chase back in 2008, but life happened and I was never able to get out as much as I wanted to to build any success until the last 5 years or so. I just hit my mid-30s, so I feel like I'm just a bit too old now to really be counted amongst the younger generation, but I'm a bit too young and inexperienced to be considered a veteran chaser. My chase style has been greatly influenced by the styles of folks here on this forum, so I find myself chasing in an "individual silo" as well rather than collaborating with other chasers. Even when I would encounter other chasers out in the field, it never really goes beyond a brief chat on what we are thinking about the setup or storm at that time. There is a common meme phrase that floats around social media: "Born too soon to X, but born too late to Y." For me it looks sort of like "Born too soon to be a chase streamer, but born too late to sell photos and video." I really feel like that describes how I fit into the chaser generations.

It was much the same way for me when I started what I call "real chasing" (more than a handful times of a year and further than a couple of hours away) back in 2009. I've met some good people along the way, but unless you were "known", you might as well be invisible, which it still that way in many ways (definitely for me, which is more than fine). Honestly, chasing has always been approached from a competition standpoint as opposed to a collaborative effort so you get a bunch of individuals working to gain clout "siloed" with only a handful making any gains, whereas now you have multiple chasers rising in the ranks together, seeing these epic storms the last two months that the rest of us are drooling over. My opinion is that the young group of YT chasers working in unison are quickly changing the hierarchy of who's who in the chasing world, which has been kind of fun to watch.

 

[Dan Robinson]

At least from my perspective, I think that the levels of collaboration have probably been the same through the generations. The competitive aspects and closed circles of info sharing have always been a thing (CFDG, etc) but the spirit of helping each other has been there, too. That's part of the legacy of this very forum and web site. This place was just as hopping in the 1990s and 2000s as what we see today on social media.

When I was first learning how to chase the Plains, I craved every bit of info I could get. A part of me was bummed I wasn't included in the 'elite' chaser circles to glean from their expertise. But I also see how that would result in them giving away many times hard-earned, valuable and privileged information (like the day's chase target). I didn't really deserve to just be handed that on a silver platter. I had to go out there and learn a lot of the craft on my own to get to where they were. I'm thankful for that now.

It's hard to *not* chase solo, especially if you're still maintaining other aspects of life (family, job, etc). Adding another person's schedule and their other limitations to the mix has a huge impact on what you're able to do (like sleep in your car to save money on hotels, as one example). I used to have chase partners up until 2006. It was just so hard to have a big pattern coincide with others' ability to get time off, drop everything and go. We were lucky to have one 5-day stretch in a season that everyone could make an entire trip together, and good luck on a nice period of flow on the Plains happening during that time. Chasing with other 'hardcore' chasers wasn't easy either, as we were all coming from different parts of the country. There was never a meet-up place that didn't mean an extra 8-10 hour drive for at least one of us to get back to our cars afterward.

This is a good discussion, maybe warranting a break off into it's own "Chasing across the generations" thread?