Jack ArmstrongArizona Republic
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TUCSON — Warren Faidley’s house is full of stuff: flintlock pistols, swords, photos of his work, an old diving helmet, a model blimp on a track that crosses the living room overhead and a poster from the original “Twister” movie. An old cowboy movie is playing on the TV.
On a coat hook by the door hangs a fedora, a bullwhip and a leather messenger bag. It’s like Indiana Jones just stopped by for lunch — or like there’s a real-life version sitting on the couch, kicking his bare feet up on a cluttered table, his hands still scarred from cuts he endured during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
It's mid-June, and Faidley has just returned from chasing tornados across the central plains. He’s back in Tucson for the summer to pursue monsoon storms and lightning.
Faidley has been described as the first full-time professional storm chaser and earned the nickname “Cyclone Cowboy.” His work has been published around the world and used in the “Twister” poster back in 1996. He’s written several books and stars in a commercial for Miller Beer in which he captures a photo of a thunderstorm, heads to a local bar and exchanges the shot for a tall glass of beer.
“Warren is my childhood hero,” said Tori Jane Ostberg, a Phoenix-based chaser who runs Copper State Storm Chasing. Faidley’s autobiography, “Storm Chaser: In Pursuit of Untamed Skies” was like her Bible, she said. “He’s who I fashioned my entire life plans out of.”
These days, Faidley isn’t as active as he once was.
“It's not the driving force that it used to be where I had to be there,” he said.
That’s a good thing though, Faidley said. Things are different now.
The search for great photos begins early
Faidley was attracted to extreme weather from a young age. He saw a lot of it as his family moved around the country. He spent time living near Topeka, Kansas, not far from where the 1966 Topeka Tornado killed 17 people and injured over 500. In Mobile, Alabama, his mom would huddle the family in the hallway during hurricane and tornado warnings. In Tucson, where he grew up, he would bike around during monsoon storms just for the excitement.
“We lived out near the base on the far southeast side of town,” he said. “When they rolled in, you could see them come straight in.”
He originally wanted to be a pilot. His dad worked at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson and his family lived near the end of the runway. But his eyesight wasn’t good enough.
Feeling aimless, he continued with school, studying journalism at the University of Arizona. He started shooting photos of lightning, thinking he might like to work for a newspaper, but nobody was hiring. He started to shoot photos of the most extreme things he could find and take them to any newspaper willing to pay.
“So one time I'd go to the (Arizona Daily) Star with some amazing front page photo, and then like two weeks later, I'd go over to the (Tucson) Citizen,” he said.
The lifestyle was already pulling him in. He started sleeping with a police scanner to snag front-page photos of events like major fires. Before long, he had a job with the Tucson Citizen. He continued shooting the extreme, clashing with his editor over only wanting to cover breaking news while building up his own portfolio of stock images.
In February 1989, Faidley shot a photo of a lightning bolt striking a light pole in an oil and gas tank farm near Tucson. Life magazine published the shot, describing Faidley as a “storm chaser.”
At that point, he’d already been mastering his craft, developing film in the newspaper’s photo lab. He left the Citizen as an established stock photographer and started his own agency. There was a wide-open market for high-quality weather photos, and Faidley was about to shoot to the top of it.
“There was no one else doing it,” he said. “You went to a stock agency, they were all fake photos of tornadoes … when I came out with a good one, it would sell night and day.”
Traveling the country for storm photos
Faidley’s work dominated the field in the 1990s. He published his autobiography with the Weather Channel, the same book that would one day become Ostberg’s Bible.
He shot Hurricane Andrew, hiding out in a parking garage and watching as President George H.W. Bush arrived in the aftermath. He shot tornadoes, lightning and dust storms. One year, he drove a fortified chasing vehicle with a roll cage and bulletproof glass. Faidley was used to driving in dust and dirt from the days when he would crash into sofas in the desert in an old stock car he won in a bet, a detail that somehow becomes minor compared with the rest of his career.
Faidley was doing interviews around the world. One crew from China saw Faidley and his cowboy hat and called him “the Cyclone Cowboy.” The nickname stuck, and his hat and sunglasses became iconic.
His second big break came through a fax from Warner Bros. They wanted to write a movie based on the Cyclone Cowboy persona. Faidley thought it was a prank from a friend.
“I almost said 'eff you,'” he said.
But it was the real deal. A writer visited Faidley in Tucson. The concept of the movie shifted, but Faidley was kept on as a consultant, and one of his photos was used on the movie poster. “Twister” was released in 1996 and was the second-highest grossing film of the year. That sent Faidley’s career “into orbit,” he said. Every few years he’d come up with another photo that would make it big.
The landscape changes and so do the chasers
But by the mid-2000s, the industry was changing. The rise of social media and camera phones meant anyone could snap a storm photo. Roads were starting to fill up with amateur chasers and locals trying to get a look at the weather. Back in the day, meeting a fellow chaser on the road was comforting, Faidley said. Now, chasers clog roads like the lines of traffic leaving a football game.
The days of an untapped market for extreme weather content were distant. For Faidley, that meant the writing was on the wall for the profession that made him a celebrity. He noticed a split in the industry when he lost a lucrative deal to be a storm preparedness spokesperson for Home Depot. An executive saw “Storm Chasers” on the Discovery Channel and decided the risky profession was too reckless to be associated with.
Faidley was facing a decision. Act as a journalist, treat close calls as part of the job, or put himself in increasingly dangerous situations to remain at the forefront of the industry?
“It's just not me to go out and do that,” Faidley said. "I kind of missed that train. I think if I'd had gone that way, I probably could have stayed up in the ranks of the publicity where everybody else is. But I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to sell myself out.”
He took a step back from the madness, but his career had already defined an industry and inspired a generation of weather-obsessed kids who were ready to take up the mantle. Ostberg, enamored with Faidley’s work since her childhood, started chasing when she got her driver’s license in the early 2000s. The madness of modern chasing is all she knows.
“It's definitely the other chasers that scare me more than the tornadoes,” she said.
In 2017, Ostberg’s friend Corbin Jaeger was killed by a pair of Weather Channel storm chasers. The chasers habitually ran red lights and traffic signs and violated basic traffic laws while shooting footage for their “Storm Wranglers” show, according to a lawsuit filed by Jaeger’s mother.
Some people “relish being the bad guy,” said Mike Olbinski, a Phoenix-based photographer who started seriously chasing in the late 2000s. Olbinski made a career out of licensing his footage. Some of his video of a supercell near Booker, Texas, in 2013 made it into "Thor 2," and he and his friends cheered when they saw his name in the end credits, he said.
Despite some reckless chasers, the community is tight. Ostberg said she noticed a shift after Jaeger was killed. People were kinder, she said.
After “Twister” star Bill Paxton died, chasers used their equipment to acknowledge his impact, Olbinski said.
“We had a moment where everybody put their spotter dots to certain GPS coordinates to spell out BP on the radar map that everybody looks at,” he said.
'Ridiculous lengths' to see some clouds
As long as there are storms, there will be those willing to chase them. It’s an addictive pursuit powered by a drive to get the perfect shot, to capture a moment of awe-inspiring weather within a single frame. It’s made up of incredible highs and devastating lows, often painfully close in time.
Faidley recalled a time he and a friend both captured the same exploding thunderhead only for his friend to kick over his own tripod while the two were jumping and dancing in celebration.
The photo was ruined. Faidley’s version was printed “everywhere,” he said.
The chase can take you anywhere, and when the clouds start swirling, it’s almost impossible not to answer the call. A brewing storm compels a chaser out of bed at night, draws them states away from their families, pulls them like a vortex toward extreme weather against the lines of traffic fleeing the scene.
“We go to ridiculous lengths just to maybe see some cool clouds,” Ostberg said.
Sometime during tornado season around 2016, Olbinski was in Chugwater, Wyoming, crying and pounding the side of his car. He had been distracted from his original target in Colorado and was chasing a storm that turned out to be not much of anything. Photos were coming in of his original target, and they were exactly what he had set out to capture.
Only a couple of days earlier, he was on the way back from a long chasing trip in Montana when a friend told him about a tornado worth checking out. He hadn’t seen his family in over a week. When he got home, his wife sensed what he was about to tell her.
“Don’t say it tonight,” she said. “Just have fun. Tell me tomorrow.”
Olbinski flew out the next night. A few other chasers persuaded him to head to Chugwater, Wyoming. It turned out to be useless. Olbinski stood there, pounded his car and contemplated quitting.
“I came up here and failed myself, failed my family,” Olbinski said. “I was gone for 12 days and left again, flew out here, rented a car, spent all this money and I botched it because I let someone else decide what I was going to do or influence me.”
After a big storm, Ostberg’s social media feed is full of chasers who missed their shot wondering if they’ll ever want to chase again. But they always do.
The new “Twisters" film, set to release Friday, seems to capture the current state of the industry. It follows a retired storm chaser who crosses paths with a “reckless social-media superstar,” named Tyler Owens (played by Glen Powell) who posts his adventures online for clout. There’s a lot of groaning within the industry about the new wave of interest the film will create, Ostberg said, but she’s against gatekeeping. People will chase regardless, and it's better to educate them.
Read more on the new film: In 'Twisters,' Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell refresh a classic in a fun watch
Last year, Ostberg and her friend were approached by a production company about starring in a documentary about women in storm chasing. “Weather Women” will start filming next year. Ostberg cries every time she watches the trailer. As a young girl, she watched “Storm Chasers” and dreamed of chasing. Now she’ll have the chance to inspire a new generation of girls.
“That I could be someone else’s Warren Faidley … it’s literally a dream come true.”
'I was the original'
Faidley may have taken a step back, but he still has a foot in the game. He still chases and occasionally takes physicians, adventurers or people with an interest in meteorology on storm-chasing tours. It’s a social event for him now. His truck has no roll cage, no bulletproof glass, just an iPad and some jerry cans for extra gas.
“I love to go out and chase and meet with people I've been chasing with for 23 years,” he said. “We’ll have a steak and a bourbon and go out.”
He’s also active on X, where he posts about weather, shares some of his work and as the “Twisters” release draws closer, talks about his role in the production of the original film.
Faidley wasn’t involved in the new film, but he did have one thought about it. In one scene in the trailer, Glen Powell's character is seen speaking to a crowd of fans outside of his storm-chasing vehicle. He’s wearing a big cowboy hat and a pair of sunglasses. Sound familiar?
“The lead guy is wearing that same hat, my same Ray-Bans,” Faidley said, laughing. “I’m like 'what the eff?' I was the original.”
