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Their friends and family don't always get it.

Becky Baker said her mother cried last year before she headed out on a trip to chase storms in the Midwest. After this year's trip, the 2003 Pulaski County High School graduate said her mother asked her "Have you gotten this out of your system yet?" No. She plans to go back next year.

Erich Dalton, a 2004 Pulaski grad, called home on his cellphone while he was watching a tornado in Nebraska in late May. His sister picked up the phone.

"She's like, 'OK,'" Dalton recalled. "Then I said, 'Oh crap, it's coming right for us.'" He hung up the phone as the team rode away to safety. Later, he called back to let his family know he was safe. He said his sister gave him another lukewarm response to his excitement.

It's not for everyone. But Pulaski County High School meteorology teacher Dave Carroll is looking for a couple more high school or college students from Southwest Virginia to join next year's trip into Tornado Alley.

A few things to consider:

(1) No one without a driving passion for severe storms need apply. A casual interest in weather isn't enough, or just a "that would be neat to do" feeling. Do you have storm posters on your wall? Do you have storm videos? If so, you're the kind of person Carroll is looking for.

(2) Eating and sleeping are not consistent during a chase trip. Fast food and snacks sometimes replace dinner. You never know where you're going to end up staying each night.

(3) It's not a sightseeing trip. Everyone along fills an active role on the team.

(4) There's no guarantee you'll get to see a tornado.

(5) Anything you saw in the movie "Twister" ... just forget it. It's fiction.

The group saw three tornadoes this year, all from the same thunderstorm on the final day of the trip. The chasers saw 10 rotating wall clouds, or the lowered cloud base that is sometimes the precursor to tornado development. But in four days, they saw nothing worth writing home about.

One day, they chased the wrong storm. Storms formed on the horizon east and west. The storm to the east looked well organized; the storm to the west didn't. They went after the storm to the east. It fell apart. The storm to the west blossomed and spawned several tornadoes.

Another day, they drove into an area that the Storm Prediction Center's experts said would be a hot spot for thunderstorm development. Nothing happened.

Carroll's gang logged 6,200 miles, zigzagging back and forth between Kansas and Nebraska. Most years, the Oklahoma-Texas Panhandle area is the target, but the storminess fired much farther north this year.

While Carroll and Maria Floyd, a veteran storm chaser from South Carolina, chose the general area the chasers headed toward each day, the leaders' role after that was primarily driving the two vans. Once on the road, students do the analysis and choose exactly where to go.

The students aren't weather novices; some have some impressive storm credentials even before hitting the road to the Midwest. For instance, the appropriately named Chase Duncan, a recent graduate of Pulaski County High School, is a local Skywarn storm spotter. Seth Price, a senior material sciences and engineering major at Virginia Tech, is also a Skywarn spotter and an amateur radio operator, frequently staying in touch with local authorities and the National Weather Service in tracking storms.

Interested students must take either a Skywarn spotter course or a basic meteorology course, and there is a nominal fee to join the next chase trip, slated for May 2005.

Still interested? Dave Carroll's e-mail is carrolld@vt.edu. Space is limited.

For more information on this year's storm chase, see: www.icsrc.org/TILT/Weatherline/stormchase2004.htm