North Vancouver woman feels alive chasing storms
If there’s a hurricane barrelling toward Florida, most people cancel their travel plans.
But Jade Vajna would be the first to pack her bags, hop on a plane, and plant herself in the eye of the storm. With fall around the corner, “hurricane season is going to be upon us,” said Vajna, excitement evident in her voice. “If it hits Florida, maybe I’ll go down.”
By day, the North Vancouver woman works in tech support. On her days off, she is a storm chaser who travels across North America in pursuit of extreme weather occurrences to experience and document them.
Vajna’s fascination with weather started early, a passion inadvertently encouraged by her mother, a flight attendant who was in Jamaica when hurricane Gilbert, one of the most intense Atlantic hurricanes on record, hit.
She took photos of the action, and showed a young Vajna, who thought: “I want to be in a hurricane one day.” She was seven.
In 2014, Vajna joined a stormchasing tour run by Cloud 9 in Tornado Alley in the U.S., roaming the U.S. Midwest like the storm chasers glamorized in the Hollywood movie Twister, starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.
Her group of 20 chasers met in Norman, Okla. then went on a nomadic road trip going wherever the forecast took them.
Forecasts are one thing, explained Vajna, but there’s also an art that is a part of chasing, involving evaluation of data along with factors such as topography, traffic, and access to an escape route. Then you position yourself and hope for the best.
On Vajna’s first chase day, she saw and filmed hail the size of golf balls hurtling down onto the van. It was a “mind-blowing brush with death,” she said, admitting she was hooked.
The moment felt like “this was what I’m supposed to be doing — a feeling this is why I’m alive.”
What was supposed to be a twoweek tour became a five-week trip that took Vajna and her fellow chasers across several states, including Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico and Missouri.
Since then, she has gone on more trips, documenting extreme weather and natural phenomena on her blog and getting some photos and videos aired on the Weather Network, which accepts submissions from the public.
In 2016, Vajna was in Ontario and filmed steam devils, or vortexes of steam, rising up from a frozen lake on a sunny day. That footage later aired on Feb. 14 on the Weather Network “It was the best Valentine’s Day ever,” she said.
She also spent her birthday this year in a small town in Colorado where she saw five tornadoes. “Best birthday ever,” Vajna glowed.
Storm chasing can however be an expensive hobby. Each twoweek tour costs about $3,000, and there’s no guarantee you’ll see tornadoes.
“But you’ll see weather for sure,” she said, like hail or cloud structures you won’t see in B.C.
In September, Vajna plans to attend Chaser Con, a storm chasing convention in Winnipeg where she can talk shop with other chasers.
Chasing is a small subculture, especially in B.C., which is known more for its temperate climes than fearsome or freaky weather.
On an app called Radar Scope, which allows chasers to track
storms and the location of other chasers, Vajna appears as the lone dot in B.C. The closest, she said, is in Calgary.
On Vancouver Island, Michelle Alksne runs the Vancouver Isle Storm Chasers group on Facebook, which has close to 550 members. She posts photos and videos of local weather occurrences in the Comox Valley, mostly storms, flooding, hail and cloud formations.
A self-described adrenalin junkie, Alksne gets into action whenever a storm hits. Instead of hunkering down, she and some friends get their gear prepared then head out to a prime spot to witness the storm.
Often, it might mean jumping a barricade or going into a closed-off area, but not too far in, added Alksne hastily. “I won’t risk my life.”
In B.C., the bread and butter weather occurrences are rain storms, wind storms, lightning storms, flooding, waves, and cloud patterns. Occasionally, Alksne could spot waterspouts, a vortex made of an accumulation of clouds that occurs over water, most often the Strait of Georgia.
Vajna said she hasn’t gone to Tofino, famed for its winter storm watching, since she was a kid. But if there’s a big wind storm, she might head to the island.
For Vajna, storms feel alive, each with its own personality, so much so that she can tell storms she has experienced in person apart from each other.
“It’s almost like it’s an organism that’s alive,” she said.
“Each one is so unique and seeing the planet in action, doing its balancing act to balance the atmosphere, is so cool.”
On Vajna’s weather wish list: a hurricane. But hurricanes are tough, she noted, because they’re more dangerous, especially because “you’d want to be in the eye, otherwise you’re just hanging out in the rain.”
But it’s not just violent weather occurrences that Vajna loves.
Also on her wish list: the aurora, or the polar lights.
One of her most memorable experiences was watching the totality of the solar eclipse last year when she travelled to a Walmart parking lot in Salem, Ore., and saw darkness fall and swirling patterns in the sun’s corona become visible, an experience she describes as “otherworldly.”
It’s these moments that Vajna feels most connected to nature.
“Because we are so disconnected to nature in our daily lives, it makes me feel alive, connected and whole and present,” she said.
“You’re front row to Mother Nature’s show.”