My first tornado, again.

Akron seems to be my lucky spot. Sort of. Two years ago just east of Akron and west of Otis I found myself accidentally at the base of a quickly rotating wall cloud and got hit with a blast of cool wind so fast I wildly looked around and up, caught what I thought was a glimpse of a funnel almost directly over me. It was smooth, and spindly, and was so frightened at what I thought I saw spinning back up into the cloud that I didn’t do a double take: I lost situational awareness, absolutely panicked threw my camera gear into the back of my Jeep and the wind was so strong I had to throw it in reverse to be able to shut the door after slamming on my brakes.

My awesome escape route road to the south turned out to be a driveway that ended 1/16th of a mile at a farmhouse where I came to a premature skidding halt, and nodded as two people ushered me into their house and down their basement stairs, the frightened looks on their faces scaring me out of looking behind me as I leaped up their steps, afraid of what I might see, and praying that I made it out of whatever mess I had gotten in and promising myself to study tornado forecasting until my eyes bled and that this never, ever happened again.

To this day I dont know what I saw above me, exactly. I know there was a tornado reported just in the corn field I was standing at – chasers on the hwy on the other side saw it from a safe distance at the same time I was on that dirt road on the other side. I do know that a semi trailer full of storage was knocked over just on the other side of the house I was in, and two old wooden livestock watering towers were blown into pieces to the south. Haybales measuring 4×5 and weighing 800 lbs and stacked 4 high were thrown to the east and south, and it sounded like a freight train over our heads standing in the basement for a good three minutes.

But where the NWS said it touched down and where I was standing were awfully close, but not a match – it’s possible the funnel just hovered above me as it roped back up and the cell shifted south (which it did according to the track), and likely what hit me (and that farm) that day was powerful RFD. The stings on my face from dirt and rocks blasting me with the wind were temporary, but the lesson has stayed with me. The plain fact is that I was way, way too close to a rotating wall cloud on a tornadic storm cell and I had been for a while by that point – I had been dancing with it, getting a remarkable timelapse of it and it bit me in a way I won’t forget.

Since then, each chase I have done is planned and plotted with far more respect, caution and strategy and it’s worked out very well so far. I also spent a lot of time discussing forecasting with the help of some really smart and experienced people, and I’ve read and studied in the fall and winter. I even made flash cards.

Last year was a mild tornado year according to chasers and almanacs on the high plains and I used the weaker storms as very good real-world, low pressure practice. I’m on my third spring in Colorado and so far I’ve been on three chases, each time still learning but also surprising myself with good planning and smart decisions that have yielded good positions. Sure, I’ve made mistakes, but I’ve also caught some great photos even on really fast-moving storm lines that are hard to position on.

In Akron earlier this month I saw a tornado that made funny squiggle ropes toward the end of its lifespan and a funnel that didnt quite touch down to become a full-fledged tornado, each on a different day near Akron. And the best part was that I was a safe distance away, not possibly directly under it and that no one was harmed as it touched down on empty land. They aren’t the best photos, but considering what happened the first time I am more than happy with them.

It’s the end of May and I haven’t seen the types of storms I want to – fully formed supercells marching their way north east, rotating between LP, HP and Classic forms as they slowly spin across the high plains. The busy month is coming up for storms in Colorado, so I hope my winning streak with Akron continues.

New Timelapse: Tempestas: (Noun) Latin for ‘Storm’

Storm chasing, as it turns out, is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.

Tempestas is the culimnation of my first year in Colorado, and my first handful of attempts at forecasting, tracking and shooting storms.

Photographing severe and tornadic storms has pushed my existing skills beyond my known limits and has required me to adopt entirely new competencies. Weather forecasting is now something I study regularly.

Spending 50% of the time you’ve lived somewhere in quarantine is not a great way to make new friends, but I’ve been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a few people, both online and in real life, who have been generous with their knowledge, experience and intuition when it comes to tracking storms. These folks are acknowledged in the end slate of Tempestas and have my ongoing gratitude.

Luck, Skill, and Everything In Between

The first time I went out to try to track storms, I lacked even the most basic knowledge of which direction to go, so I just followed the lightning. Even mediocre chasers will tell you this is a bad strategy for a variety or reasons. I ended up chasing a fast-moving storm and never caught it after 75 miles, turned around, chased something else to the south, lost all signals on a dirt road, in the dark, caught between two nocturnal mesoscale complex storms and had no idea which way to go.

Out of sheer luck, that night ended safely, thankfully, but it opened my eyes immediately to what it was going to take for me to get the kinds of shots I was after. I instantly bought a college-level textbook about weather, and started poking around on the internet for some pointers from people like Skip Talbot, Reed Timmer and Pecos Hank.

After several times out across Colorado’s eastern plains, south to almost New Mexico and north into Wyoming, there’s still a lot I don’t know but I’m eager to continue learning. I’ve become so much more familiar with the landscape, do’s and don’t’s and am much more comfortable heading into the 2021 chasing season.

Tempestas, like almost all of my other compilations, is the result of thousands of miles, planning, strategizing and timing. Forecasting, navigating, and shooting in the most challenging conditions I’ve ever faced. It is not the greatest footage I’ve ever captured, but it’s my starting point.

And Our Love Is A Ghost That The Others Can’t See

I chose “Familiar” by Agnes Obel as the soundtrack as this is a song that represents so much of this experience for me. Nature, and by relation, weather, is my first and greatest ongoing passion. Tornadic supercells represent the most violent, dynamic and random storms on Earth, and trying to capture them feels like an adversarial, but graceful, ballet between something insignifant vs something all-powerful. It’s also very personal; everyone probably chases for their own reasons.

My interest in photography sprang from an irresistable desire to visually communicate to a larger audience the things I found beautiful. Storm chasing tornadic supercells and documenting them via timelapse is the absolute pinnacle of that deep-seated passion, but adds exponentially more challenges (including the challenge of “not dying in the process.”)

It’s frustrating, it’s boring, and it’s really, really hard.

I can’t wait to do it again next year.

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Nocturnal Supercell, Longmont Colorado Aug 13, 2019

I shot this in my pajamas. I love it when the storms come to you.

Otis Tornado / Supercells – August 11, 2019

My first storm chase: Limon, Colorado – June 2019

My first real storm chase began with a drive and a good guess from metro Denver. Late June usually sees the end of the tornado / severe weather systems that wreak havoc on the eastern plains and into the wider ‘tornado alley’ of the connected U.S.

Having made just about every mistake I could have the first night I attempted to go get some lightning shots, I had a strategy this time and planned to stick to it come hell or highwater. I headed east on highway 70 and figured that Limon was a good starting place since it had roads that split in all directions like spokes on a wheel.

Considering the majority of the tornado-warned storms had passed through the area for the year already I wasn’t too worried about getting caught in some crazy tornado, but the chances were good for tracking down a supercell – as long as I could avoid the hail. As I drove out of the city I refreshed the lessons I have been studying about storm tracking, but overall I had no real idea if my general destination would yield tangible results. It’s still guesswork at best. Or was, since I “guessed” right (based on my rudimentary knowledge.)

As I pulled into Limon to wait for what’s called “initiation” (a storm going from messy cell to a ‘supercell shape’ as it traverses across open, flat land) I stopped for a Red Bull, thinking that if all went as planned I wouldn’t be home until well after 10pm. I checked Twitter casually and saw one of the handles I follow, Pawnee Storm Chasers, was also in Limon and looking to talk shop. Never one to miss an opp to ask a million questions to people smarter than myself, I replied that I’d head over to the parking lot where they were.

After chatting for a bit they agreed to let me follow them – a wall cloud and severe thunderstorm-warned storm had developed on the cell we were tracking to the west and it was time to go. They had the jump on the other chasers by at least 10 entire minutes – it seemed the cell everyone else was tracking on the Spotter app was a dud, and you could see the little red dots change direction to the south after they realized their error.)

I’m glad no one else was there when I got out of my Jeep. I had never seen a supercell and I lost my damn mind. It was incredible. The storm is contained to a single mass of moisture on the Doppler, but the in-real-life scale of it is insane. Day turns to night and the speed of its rotation and velocity was so much faster than I could have imagined. Forget setting a timelapse to one shot every 10 seconds – this was one every two seconds, and even one frame per second would have probably been the better way to go.

Other important tips? Look both ways before crossing the road. For reals. In the few minutes of me jumping around screaming at this dark grey-blue mothership of a weather phenomenon, dozens of chasers showed up. All of a sudden ‘the middle of nowhere’ was very busy. I had no time for a second set up, which was fine since I discovered the ballhead on my tripod had busted and I had wasted precious minutes having my mental freakout at the sky. Turns out you get about 5-10 minutes (max) until you need to clear out of the way because it turns out these harbingers of icey tornadic doom go haul about 40-50 miles per hour.

Here’s me, burning rubber south like an idiot ten minutes later trying to swing under the RFD (the Rear Flanking Downdraft) for the shot. The red square is the tornado warning area, the yellow is the severe thunderstorm warning area. Also: never ever ever do this.

In Colorado, the tornados are F0/1 most of the time with the occasional F2 to the south or north eastern corners where the state meets Kansas / Nebraska. Supercells march east and cycle up or down in their size and strength and that’s where you get the F3, 4’s and 5’s that do major damage and kill people. Several chasers have died this way when a tornado has shifted tracks or they get caught in a microburst. This storm being an exponential fraction of a larger, more intense storm you’d see to the east is my rationale but it was a dumb mistake that won’t happen again.

I caught back up with the Pawnee guys back in Limon, with the cell just a few minutes behind us. While they quickly filled up with gas, I snapped the above pic of the first Mammatus clouds I’ve ever seen. Mammatus clouds form on the underside of the anvil, which usually blows out ahead of the actual cell core due to stronger wind shear at higher elevations (30-40-50,000 feet.)

Weather.gov has a great side shot of a supercell that shows what an anvil looks like. You’ve seen them, but you probably didn’t know what they were called:

One thing that surprised the absolute hell out of me in a day of surprises was the strength of the inflow to the storm. I asked one of the guys what they thought they windspeed was and they said a good 40mph. It was so much stronger than I expected – I am definitely going to need heavier tripods.

We pulled out of Limon and were booking it to a town called Hugo to the southeast of the that same cell when I had to pull off to get the below picture. There was this horse in a field with a cow, and no other animals around. I approached the fence and you could tell they weren’t used to people approaching them and they both showed signs of nervousness. I talked to them and was as calm as I could be as what appeared to be a possible tornado was forming near the RFD:

I was out there about 6-7 minutes and the amount of times the storm changed in those few minutes was mindboggling. I saw two possible tornados forming, rotation in the wall cloud in different spots that started to form a funnel but then didn’t, and the whole time the thing was getting closer and closer. These things are truly spectacular – several variations of those few minutes are included in the gallery at the bottom of this post.

Afterward, I caught up with the guys again who had some video of the rotation in the back of the storm. After much scrutiny and disagreement on Twitter, they put in a call to NOAA the next day to confirm that a small tornado had briefly formed. Not a bad first day for me, everyone agreed on that.

The cell had cycled down by that point (two hours!) and we joined another couple of chasers – one of whom, I am told, was very very famous – and figured out what everyone’s next move would be. I didn’t hang out long after that –   The temperature was cooling down so the cells were blowing themselves out. Pretty though. Also,  I knew I had quite a drive home and it seemed the chase was way further east now, near the border of Kansas. Too far for me as much as I’d have loved to have kept chasing and just gotten a motel room somewhere. I thanked my new friends and started northwest back home.

I read the next morning on Twitter that some chasers had followed the cells into Kansas and been surprised by a microburst as they were pulling off a cell and everyone got their windows busted in from large hail. That sucks.

On the way back I managed to grab one more amazing supercell – a small, dark mothership looming in my direction. I pulled off the highway and nabbed this:

The beginning of the cell passing over me, caught with my iPhone. For scale, the white things on the horizon were water towers that weren’t too far away and also not more than 15-20 feet tall.

I stood directly under this mothership supercell as it passed over me (the core was far to my south) and slack-jaw marveled at how low and dark the clouds were. It felt like I could just reach up and my hand would disappear into the dark black and blue fog. Warm inflow turned to icey cold outflow and a minute later I was being pelted by random nickel-sized hail, probably flung up in the cell above the core and out of the back of the system in the RFD – it was blue sky over my head when it started coming down, if that’s any indication of the wind associated with these storms. It wasn’t a lot, but it certainly startled me. Another lesson learned in a day of lessons.

There are storms all summer out here, but the bulk of the tornado-warned systems occur in May / June, so I have to probably wait a bit until I get more footage. The real chasers who do this professionally have all gone north to Canada this week, where Reed Timmer is posting some serious action from Saskatchewan if you want to see much better footage and photos of these kinds of storms.

Also, I would be remiss in posting this blog if I didn’t shout out a thanks to Pawnee Storm Chasers for letting me crash their day. They checked on me when we got split up to make sure I was ok, and were super knowledgeable about these systems. Check them out at https://twitter.com/PawneeStorm for some good photos and videos.

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Tornado-warned supercell SW of Limon, Colorado, June 21

So I live in Colorado now and I’m never leaving (for now.)

For the past….ten years…. or so I knew I’d be leaving Los Angeles at some point. For the past five years I knew I’d be leaving California altogether. Earlier this winter, knowing the baby numero dos was on the way, my backpack and I made several trips to the Denver / Boulder area and within five weeks was closed on a beautiful house in between Denver and Boulder.

With the pregnancy, the move, a curious and ceaselessly energetic toddler and the inevitable 9-5 grind it has been a strikingly long time since I picked up a camera or hit the nature trail (though I did get to go camping in January in Death Valley.) Along with a massive and slow seasonal melt, all of that is starting to change.

I started this blog as I learned to use a nice camera I purchased. I still have a long way to go in terms of honing my skills but I at least know how to use the equipment now. The things I’ve learned along the way have had little to do with the actual gear, and more about learning to work with nature and the thousand forces that affect what I’m trying to accomplish.

The latest – and among the top of the heap in terms of importance – is the weather in Colorado. Specifically, the weather along the eastern plains once you get east of the city of Denver. Because the weather here will try to kill you if you are not careful.

Baseball sized hail, tornadoes, electrical storms. All of these are new to me because I’m from California where all we really worry about are earthquakes every 50 years or so. I’ve been studying local weather patterns relentlessly: convergence zones, dry lines, dew points, wind shear, storm fronts, low pressure, high pressure, various types of clouds, wedge tornadoes, rope tornadoes, funnel clouds, dustnadoes, inflow, outflow, down drafts,  super cells, front line cells, multi cells, where the bear cage is and most of all: Doppler and how to read those funny colorful pixels on a map.

I am now a certified storm spotter, and learning to read Doppler has been a huge help in teaching me about storm tracks, positioning and planning.

Best of all, there’s been a lot of times so far in just the two months I’ve been here that I haven’t had to go more than steps out of my backyard to catch a killer electrical storm.

So as I learn how not to die in this new environment, please enjoy my latest shots!

 

 

How the Shot Was Got Episode V: 2018

Hello! I am back with a mother of a video – episode five of my dumb behind the scenes series of my various trips combines several trips I look in 2018 to nab some timelapses, all of which you can check out below or by searching for timelapses on this page.

It’s a bit of a longer video than the other ones, but it’s got snaps of *all* the places I went, a snoring dog, a demon tree god, dozens of lakes, a good soundtrack, a cabin in the woods and a sweet emo ending to the dulcet tones of Joey Ramone. It pays off so give it a whirl.

Overall, a lot of what you see and places I went was….. hard. And awesome. I think the most memorable for me was that I was able to explore the Golden Trout Wilderness, which is the most remote part of the entire Sierra Nevada range – no roads come close to it except for on its north side, and that puts you at the top of an incredibly large section of the range that you have to hike (or ride, in this case) in order to see any part of it. Thanks to Rock Creek Pack Station for making that happen.

Other locations include the John Muir Wilderness, King’s Canyon, parts of Inyo National Forest, Yosemite National Park and Death Valley.

I had a blast, and can’t wait to return. Special shout out to Erika, the fastest hiker alive.

Check out the video below and leave a comment if you feel so inclined!

Death Valley, January 2019

It took getting a new camera for me to remember that still photography is a thing. I’ve been so focused over the last few years of hauling out to a location to timelapse a weather event or meteor event that I forgot how much fun it can be to just take a single photo.

This feels like the hundredth time I’ve been out to Death Valley (and it might be), but this time it was unique: I got to take my 20-year-old cousin out there and introduce her to one of the most remote, disparately grand places on Earth.

We started at the Devil’s Racetrack after an incredibly cold night at ~25 degrees. Waking up to the sound of complete nothingness and seeing the expanse of that valley, she was already impressed but when we reached the racetrack itself and she saw the moving rocks her mind was blown.

With a full three days planned to see the western/northern ends of the park, I wasted no time in setting up my cameras to capture the moving skies overhead. We managed to skirt the rain all weekend, which was a blessing since I know how fast the water can accumulate and start wrecking the place.

From there we hauled down south to Badwater the next day after back country camping in a secret spot I know. The weather did not disappoint – it was cold, but in the low 60s, which was perfect for hiking way out onto the dry lakebed itself. She really got a sense of scale after the first 2 miles and we were only a third of the way to where we were trying to be and not even close to the halfway point on the lakebed itself.

For me, almost nothing is better than introducing a place like this to a new person who maybe hasn’t seen a lot of what California has to offer in terms of diverse landscapes and interesting places to visit. I also was able to grab about a dozen new timelapses of the various areas we visited since I was rocking my new D850. With a 90MB size for each raw still frame, though, it will be a while until I have time to edit all of them (glad for my fast processor and my 1080 Nvidia card…)

The full gallery is below.

Ode: Domum – a visual poem-song to the Sierra Nevada (Timelapse)

An Ode is defined as ‘a poem meant to be sung.’

‘Domum’ is Latin for ‘home.’

Ode: Domum is my fifth and final entry into my Ode timelapse series focuses solely on a place I feel so at home: on the eastern and mid-Sierra Nevada range. The footage extends from the most remote places of the Golden Trout Wilderness to the south, to as far north as Yosemite National Park’s Tioga Pass Road. Some of the places will be instantly recognizable like Yosemite’s iconic Tunnel View and Mammoth’s Crystal Crag, while other places are so rarely visited like the remote Lower Hopkins Lake and Pioneer Basin. In the end, no image (animated or otherwise) can do justice in communicating the experience of being there, but I’ve sure had fun trying.

It’s a strange feeling to fall in love with a physical place, especially one as impossibly vast as the Sierra range, and any attempts to describe how that feels sounds crazy. I’ve spent the majority of whatever free time I can over the past 8 years crawling over as many of the trails that my aging knees can manage, desperate to see as much as I can of this truly infinite and deeply mystical place.

One technical note: The fidelity of this particular timelapse compilation is not as high as I’d have liked it to be, as much of the footage captured was done with a GoPro Hero 4 and an iPhone, which are much lighter to travel with when hiking long distances in the backcountry but not visually superior to my Nikons. But it depicts so many of the places I’ve been fortunate enough to visit and will never forget.

Some of the footage is grainy, some of it shakes, but all of it was captured with a deep sense of wonder and a need to share it with people who love it as much as I do and people who maybe might visit some part of it one day.

I also took care to highlight each location – some of the footage was shot years ago, so I did my best from memory (and quite a few minutes pouring over maps looking for whatever obscure trail I was on…) If there’s a mistake it was not intentional.

Soundtrack: Ryzu: Ennui (Waffle Edit)

Yours in continuing adventure,
PT