It’s the storm of the decade, and Benjamin Jurkovich is on the chase. In movies—like, say, Twister, one of his favorites—he’d be speeding through cornfields. Today, on the other hand, he is calmly driving around traffic circles outside Snohomish, his red compact SUV distinctive only for the camera mount that shoots above it like a tiny, empty flagpole.

He pulls off US 2 on the Ebey Slough bridge, then turns under it and onto an unpaved road that leads to a finger of the Snohomish River. It’s the beginning of what will be a disastrous series of rainstorms in December 2025, and the waterway is crammed with sticks and logs, piling on top of each other and creating a spiky, sodden raft of wood and a serious flood risk.

As Jurkovich pulls out his drone to start taking photos, I ask him who told him the logjam would be here. He shrugs. “I know this happens when it rains,” he says. He’s so familiar with Washington weather that, even without a formal education in meteorology, he often knows how a storm will play out ahead of time.

More than a quarter million people follow Jurkovich’s Washington Weather Chasers pages on YouTube and Facebook. The video from Snohomish River would rack up 131,000 views. As historic flooding hit Western Washington in the ensuing weeks, he’d capture footage of fields turned to lakes, of houses submerged halfway up their first story, and churning rapids in swollen rivers. Some he’d sell to news organizations like ABC News and the Weather Channel; others would simply live on his channels. 

“I just love experiencing the raw power of the weather,” he says later; Jurkovich’s gentle enthusiasm is in line with his day job as a youth pastor for a church in Lake Stevens, his hometown. Flooding is actually his least favorite weather to chase, “because it’s unfortunate and stinky for pretty much everybody,” but he felt a responsibility to document what he could. His favorite weather is rather rare in the lowland parts of the state. “Whiteout, blowing snow, for whatever reason, to me, is extremely exciting,” he says.

Often, extreme weather is destructive weather; when he chases twisters east of the Rockies, he notes, “obviously, the hope is to only see tornadoes that happened in big, open, population-free fields.” Still, he says, it can be tough to process the impact of what he records. Plus, he notes that having a wife and child at home keeps him from being the type to drive into the center of a tornado. 

Jurkovich started Washington Weather Chasers in 2018 with few goals beyond having a landing page for his storm photos. Today it’s grown into a community that produces dozens of comments on most videos, with discussions of forecasts and weather predictions for the state.

Back at the Ebey Slough logjam, floating wood keeps coming down the river and crashing into the pile of sticks and trash. These logs were washed into the Snohomish by the epic rains of the atmospheric river; some were trees that had only just toppled because riverbanks became so saturated that their roots could no longer hold them upright. It smells like mud, and it’s clear that the bank we’re standing on could flood after a few more hours of this. After he leaves the logjam, Jurkovich will drive up US 2 and capture some of the first photos of the washouts that would close the highway for weeks. It was only days after he’d passed his FAA drone pilot exam, and his media sales almost immediately recouped the cost of the drone itself.

Jurkovich posts “no politics” on his social media spaces, and those spaces have mostly managed to stay drama free, even as spats over wrong predictions or climate change claims have soured other online weather circles. He holds to his identity as a storm chaser, not a forecaster, though in December he jokingly did a polar plunge on his YouTube channel as penance after a windstorm he hyped up never materialized.

What Jurkovich has is commitment. He’ll drive to the coast for a king tide or go out scouting during a windstorm. When the geomagnetic forecast points to possible northern lights, he’ll stay up all night to post, “If you are awake, look north now!” at 4:30am with photo after photo of electric skies. His ability to pursue all forms of ephemeral phenomena is a result of his willingness to forgo guarantees. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a day job as a pastor pairs well with the comfort in the unknowable. “I don’t know if I’d be so interested in the weather if I knew what was going to happen all the time,” he says. “I think that’s part of what makes it so adventurous.”