Chasing the Sky: 3,500 Miles Across America’s Great Plains

Chasing the Sky: 3,500 Miles Across America’s Great Plains

There are trips that ease you in gently, and there are trips that grab you by the collar and don’t let go. This was firmly the latter.

Over one extraordinary week I covered something in the region of 3,500 miles, looping out of Denver and across the great open belly of America — Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas — before finally turning for home and rolling back across the Colorado plains. It was, without question, one of the most thrilling photographic adventures I’ve ever thrown myself into.

Just like the films?

I’ll hold my hands up — on that very first day, grinning like a kid and not quite believing my luck, I asked the group whether the whole thing was going to be a bit like the film Twisters. Cue much laughter and a fair few knowing looks; the new chap had well and truly given himself away.

And then, a few days in, the penny dropped. I watched a car come barrelling up the grass bank of an interstate junction to get a better line on the sky. I took in the little knots of chasers huddled over their phones at a petrol station, comparing plans and second-guessing one another. I clocked car after car rolling past, every one of them bristling with radio aerials and cameras bolted to the roof. So I rather politely suggested that, do you know what, it was almost exactly like the film!!! 

This time they had to agree.

Life on the road

Let me be honest about the rhythm of it, because it’s all part of the romance: these were long, punishing, glorious days. We’d often pull into a roadside motel well after midnight, grab whatever sleep we could, and be back out chasing the sky the next afternoon. Food was wherever and whenever we could find it — and that ran the full gamut from petrol-station snacks wolfed down at the wheel to some genuinely wonderful little Mexican restaurants tucked away in small mid-American towns. There’s a particular kind of joy in a proper plate of food after a fourteen-hour day under the heavens, I can tell you.

And we were spoiled. We had a storm every single day but the last — which, as it turned out, was perfect timing, giving us a chance to draw breath and recover a little as we made the long drive back through Colorado.