Hailstorm Leaves Damage, Bad Feelings towards Stormchasers

You can complain about Instagrammers and "influencers" jamming up in pretty places, but now they are ruining hailstorms.

"Stormchasers" have been around for a while, especially since it became possible to download weather radar on the go. Last night's devasting hailstorm in NE Colorado produced not just complaints about broken glass, damaged crops, paint stripped from houses and so, but about the chasers as well

Here are some comments off the popular northern Colorado Facebook weather page that I linked to above, just to save you the scrolling:

Driving west from Kansas yesterday, I was passed by so many storm chasers, I wondered what was up. Probably close to 50 different cars, vans and trucks

The amount of storm chasers out here last night was ridiculous. I understand needing to study storms to better predict and prepare for the future, but last night was over the top. I’m not exaggerating when I’m saying there were probably a thousand “storm chasers”. The amount of cars flying down our dirt roads and highways recklessly was scary. Cars ignoring dead end signs and continuing down trail roads. People live here. The crops growing in the fields and the livestock we are trying to tend to are our livelihoods. Have some respect!

 I seen close to 100 people along side highway 34 and off on the side roads between Brush and Akron! I don't know if they realize that storms can get dangerous real quick!

I couldn’t believe the volume of chasers out there, frankly it’s gotten out of hand. The basic rules of the road and safety come first. Some streamers actually running stop signs and of course speeding at the expense of other drivers, wildlife, and property. I’d be angry if I was one of the impacted residents.

I watched a live yesterday from a storm chaser, I won’t name names. But the convoy was HUGE tons of people…..reckless watching the others in front of them. For sure. 

My family all live near Akron-my two kids and granddaughter‘s family are all south. My daughter and her husband have a cattle ranch with two cattle guards across their property containing mommas and babies. He had to go down and stop the cars from racing through their property and hitting the cattle-some people are crazy these days. Our rural area isn’t meant for a race track so I’m glad someone cares!

Now some people found "chasing" to be genuinely educational:

I got to go storm/tornado chasing with some PhDs from NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research] (I started a weather club at my kids' middle school so it was a special opportunity) and had the time of my life! No tornados, but a couple impressive super cells, and breakfast at 3 a.m. after we drove over 800 miles. Good times. Would love to do it again with people who know what they're doing!

Just for grins I went to Instagram and searched "Colorado hailstorm," getting 984 hits, but not all from this year. Maybe there will be more by day's end.

But who gets to decide who is "reckless and irresponsible"? If you are making money, you are exempt?

Hoping for a Mast Crop

Male catkins mix with new leaves on Gambel Oak.

Walking around, I see a pretty good mix of leaves and flowers on the scrub (Gambel) oak. Because it grows in clone clusters, some are already mostly leafed while others are just beginning. 

I suppose that the biologists would claim that there is evolutionary advantage there: if the early bloomers are hit by frost, the late-bloomers might still be safe. 

I just remember last year driving past miles of frost-killed catkins—which meant few if any acorns formed, so many calories of wildlife food were just not there.

When a wildlife biologist refers to "the mast crop," I get warm tingles, because that word goes way way back connectimg our Colorado forests in a sense to the forests where Old English and its predecessors was spoken.

"Fallen nuts or acorns serving as food for animals." Old English mæst, the collective name for the fruit of the beech, oak, chestnut, and other forest trees, especially serving as food for swine, from Proto-Germanic *masto (source also of Dutch, Old High German, German mast "mast;" Old English verb mæsten "to fatten, feed"), perhaps from PIE *mad-sta-, from root *mad- "moist, wet," also used of various qualities of food (source also of Sanskrit madati "it bubbles, gladdens," medah "fat, marrow;" Latin madere "be sodden, be drunk;" Middle Persian mast "drunk;" Old English mete "food," Old High German muos "meal, mush-like food," Gothic mats "food").

Bye-bye Boy Scouts

Observation Point Hill, Medicine Bow NF, Wyoming.
Left to right: Stan Henson, John Bustos (knees) Chris Brasmer, Kenny Pettine.

 

Cooking breakfast in the Medicine Bow NF. From left:
Chris Brasmer, Kenny Pettine, Scoutmaster Wayne Parsons, R. Peterson, John Bustos
Troop 97, Fort Collins, Colorado.

 

Now I know how some ex-Catholics must feel. Yep, the Boy Scouts of America made the same mistake, at a smaller scale, as the Roman Catholic hierarchy did. When accusations of sexual abuse came up, they ignored them. They protected the  perpetrators.

The People in Charge put the image and needs of the instutition that paid their salaries ahead of the needs of the people who made up that institution. So BSA ended up with 80,000 abuse cases settled for $2.5 billion — and its image damaged forever. The LDS church, which provided at least 20 percent of all Scouts, pulled out completely. BSA filed for bankruptcy. They also started letting in girls as their male membership dropped.

According to the video linked below, by culture critic Jim Goad, the "pedophile file" of offending Scout leaders dated to 1919, less than ten years after the organization's founding. But it was kept secure at headquarters and not shared with the local Scout troups. 

Just as the church quietly moved Father Fingers, the problem priest, from parish to parish, so BSA did not stop problem leaders from moving from one Scout troop to another. 

Now as of 2025 they will rebrand BSA as "Scouting USA" and to continue to poach girls away from Girl Scouts.

My Scouting memories are mostly good. I was in two Cub Scout packs (due to family moves), two Boy Scout troops (ditto), and too-briefly in one Explorer post, until I moved again. Both Scout troops were traditionally outdoor-oriented, which I think is the key experience. 

The first scoutmaster had a son in the troop. The second did not — at least when I was there —but his job as a recreation staffer on the Roosevelt National Forest let him use us as unpaid outdoor labor, which counted toward various awards. For instance, I learned a little about surveying with a plane-table alildade while helping to lay out a new campground in the Cache la Poudre River canyon. 

On a five-day backpack trip (photos above) from the Medicine Bow NF down into the Rawah Wilderness in northern Colorado, we took turns pushing a measuring wheel as he recorded trail distances junction-to-junction in his pocket notebook,  updating the forest's backcountry trails database. (Question: did he use vacation days or did it count as "work"?)

As for pedophiles, my only experience was of some creep-o trying to pick up 14-year-old me on the bus trip to the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. But he was just a random sexual predator, not a Scout leader. (Maybe I should have sued Continental Trailways?)  

I had no pedophile encounters within Scouting, nor did I hear of any. That is not to deny the actual abuse cases, but only to say that it did not happen everywhere.

I just look back, remember the good times, and wonder how it will all play out in the future. BSA was more good than bad, but the People in Charge drove it into the ground out of their own institutional vanity. Now they think they can save it by abandoning what used to be at its heart.

Writer Jim Goad shares his own memories from the 1970s in the video The Last Boy Scout. (Warning: politically incorrect language and attitudes.)