2025 Chase Season Epilogue

[Sean Ramsey]

My season ended up....satisfactory. Really all about diamonds in the rough this year and more like one of those Arkansas diamonds you have to dig for as opposed to the crown jewels this season offered up. My chase rate was also down this year, as I kept it close to home. I chased in Kansas maybe three times, Texas several times and the rest were within Oklahoma borders. I don't even have a good reason as to why this was the case.

Arnett was of course a good score. Littlefield, Texas on April 25th was pretty alright and an overall fun chase with the slow storm motion. The Liberal,KS / Beaver, OK storm on May 28th was great from a tornado/structure/low convergence standpoint, and maybe one of the best chases of the year for me was the Hydro, OK cell on June 14th for those same reasons sans the tornado.

I'm starting to really hone in on how I want to approach my future chases, so my criteria for a successful season is now tremendously different than what it was maybe 10 years ago. A storm that may or may not produce a tornado that is lightly attended by chasers with a near zero chance of causing injury or fatalities that I can soak in for hours accompanied by a low stress/irritation factor seems to be the direction I'm headed, which means I'll probably grade my future seasons on how much enjoyment I got out of it instead of how much I scored, or how much I missed. About to become the American Pickers of chasing I reckon.

 

[Brett Nickeson]

2025 will go down as likely my worst year ever, which is crazy considering how bad 2020 and 2021 were. I'm a photographer and I've taken zero photos of storms this year. I've been working way, way too much which has limited my opportunities, and the rest have been somewhere between a tragedy and a comedy. The southern high plains where most of the action was this year was out of my reach, so I missed everything down there. I was five minutes late to the Arnett tornadoes because the target ended up being three hours further from home than anticipated. The day after that was trash. And there were a couple of busts up here locally that of course I had time for but not for Wellfleet day.

But the real kick in the nuts has been the last two days. I had wanted to make a two day trip to the Dakotas this weekend as the northern plains looked like they had finally woken up after a 10 year hiatus. But my brother scheduled a Friday meeting with our family attorney that I had to go to, so ND was out. Yesterday I was all packed up and ready to leave for eastern SD but I decided not to as I had an 8 a.m. golf tournament this morning and, at best, I would have gotten home at 2 a.m. I might have been able to do that in my 20's, but it doesn't sound ideal anymore. So I watched streams of the epic tornado(s) and hated life for a while. Turns out I got the golf tournament time wrong and our tee time isn't until 11:00. I would have had plenty of time for tornadoes and sleep. Just a comedy of errors.

Sorry for the rant, it's cathartic.