5 hours ago
7
There’s a lot of luck involved when you’re chasing monsoon storms in Arizona during July or August. This was taken on a very frustrating day when I kept missing everything. When I thought it was all over, I called it a night. I was taking a shower when I heard the rumbling and I rushed to the window. I had washed the sand out of my teeth and ears, from being in the stormy desert all day, and I didn’t want to go back out, so I thought: “I’m just going to take a shot from my motel room.”
I fancy myself as an artist but Mother Nature does all the work. If there’s a tornado on a flat horizon, how do you make that artistic? It’s something I constantly struggle with. Maybe you capture the flowers bending into it. But ultimately you just go: “Click, got it.” So any time I can do something different, like this, is rewarding.
The type of thunderstorms that were happening that day are called pulse storms, which seemingly randomly go up and come down in a cycle that lasts about 30 minutes. One will pop up and you’ll drive over, but by the time you get there it’s died, and then one pops up over the spot you just left. It’s like Whac-a-Mole.
When you have a big open sky you can see the distant storms, but I also use a radar because you might have mountains or other clouds blocking your view, and this type of storm is chaotic and unorganised. Chasing tornadoes is different. Those last for hours, and you can sometimes forecast promising conditions four or five days in advance.
I have been obsessed with storms for as long as I can remember. At four years old I was sketching tornadoes and scouring library books for them. I think the reason is, I loved monsters: Godzilla, the Loch Ness monster, UFOs. I grew up in Texas where we had tornado drills at school, but never Godzilla or UFO drills, so maybe for me tornadoes were the only monsters that actually existed.
Most people don’t want to see a tornado. Pursuing them disrupted school or family get-togethers, because I always had this ridiculous craving for storms. I’m happy when I’m around them. It’s not about adrenaline, which makes me shaky and uncomfortable. It’s about beauty. But I have had horrible near-death experiences. Every time it happens, I tell myself: “I never want to feel this again.” When you’re driving away fast because of a stupid error, thinking at any moment the car may become airborne and you will probably not survive, that feeling is terrible – and I’ve had it too many times.
The last time was in 2023, when hubris got the best of me and I drove too close to a stupidly ugly rain-wrapped tornado in Nebraska. Earlier I had missed a beautiful white tornado in the middle of nowhere – all my friends and competition were there, but I was an hour late because we were driving up from Texas. I went into catchup mode. Another storm went up, a tornado embedded in rain, so you couldn’t see it. I drove into the rain, risking my life. These rain-wrapped tornadoes are so ugly and hard to see that they do almost nothing on social media. They’re just not photogenic. Maybe 50 buddies will say: “Damn, dude, you’re brave,” and then it’s forgotten.
My friends and I debrief after storms, and in this debrief I realised: “Wow, I’m more susceptible to ego, hubris and competition than I thought.” Understanding that about myself has helped me during dangerously tempting moments to think: “Back off, dude, live to fight another day.”
My favourite storm ever? There’s a type called a cyclic supercell. It’s like a relay racer handing a baton to the next person who then hands it on to the next. These storms do that with tornadoes, and you can have multiple tornadoes on the ground as it hands on the power to the next cycling updraft. All the old chasers talked about these legendary days when a cyclic supercell travelled over open country and there were 10 or 12 photogenic tornadoes throughout the day. I had always missed them until finally, on 24 May 2016, I got the ultimate cyclic supercell over open country, well lit, crazy-beautiful tornadoes, two, sometimes three for most of the event. And it didn’t kill anybody.
Storm: Chasing Nature’s Wildest Weather by Hank Schyma is published on 28 October (DK Travel)
Hank Schyma’s CV
Born: Houston, Texas, year of the rat
Trained: Self-taught
Influences: “Jim Morrison, Stanley Kubrick and Mother Nature.”
High point: “Discovering a new transient luminous event coined the green ghost.”
Low point: “Can’t think of one. It’s been nonstop adventure. However, I did eat terrible sushi last night that tasted like rice and mayonnaise.”
Top tip: “Aim for what you like, not what you think others will like.”
