It’s been more than three decades since the fateful meeting of a sculpture-focused undergrad from Salina, Kan. and an atmospheric science major from Castle Rock, Col. at Kansas University. Jason Webb and Gregg Potter became fast friends and eventually roommates at an off-campus house in Lawrence. Together, they would breathe life into a dream that became F5! Tornado Safaris.

Jason fondly recalled the nascent days of their friendship:

“It was the early- and mid-90s, so there was internet, but nobody had it at home. Before we lived in the same house, Gregg would be on campus getting internet weather reports and then he’d rush over to my house and pick me up for a road trip. I was a local, so I knew the backroads of Kansas really well. We were always down for a road trip to see a concert, so we started making them to see if we could spot tornadoes.”

Even after they formalized those trips into a business with the first F5! Tornado Safari in 1999, mobile radar was years from becoming reality. So somebody would monitor radar equipment in a brick-and-mortar location and relay the findings to the chase cars. It added a layer of complexity to Jason’s duties as driver and navigator, in which he was responsible not only for putting clients in position to see burgeoning funnel clouds, but keeping them out of harm’s way once they’d entered the danger zone.

“The only thing we had in the car was a weather radio,” Jason said of the formative years of F5! "It was very rudimentary. Even after wireless internet came along, it wasn't mobile, so we'd have to pull up outside hotels to steal their signal for our laptops, which was easy because nobody had any passwords on their networks back then.”

But the advancement of technology that has turned F5!'s chase vehicles into rolling tornado-pursuing laboratories has been a mixed blessing to the man behind the wheel.

“There was a lot less traffic on the road in those early days," Jason noted. "Now, everybody has radar on their phones and everybody’s a storm chaser. There are easily 50 times as many people on the road. Last year (2023), we were chasing three tornadoes outside of Clovis, N.M. and we came to a complete halt in the traffic. As the sun went down, I could see six miles of headlights stacked up behind us.”

Both Jason and Gregg are now 50 and have successful business ventures that have allowed them to spend half their lives chasing twisters on the Great Plains each May. Jason founded Tamarack Cannabis in 2009 in Whitefish, Mont., a business that has grown to a second location in Kalispell, Mont. as the state expanded from medical to recreational marijuana two years ago. Widely lauded on the awards circuit for creating a customer-friendly marriage of art and artisan cultivation, Tamarack Cannabis has flourished in an outdoor recreation mecca – the very quality that attracted Jason to the Flathead Valley – and serves as a gateway to Glacier National Park.