I got a million stories of bad weather...
Early April, Yellowstone River in Paradise Valley. Two of us floating the river in a raft. Temperature in the 30s. Wind picks up, blowing directly upstream. Blows harder. Gets up to 40-50 mph. Then the snow starts. You simply couldn't look forward into the wind, because the snow was blowing right into your face and eyes and you couldn't see. We had to take turns rowing, as hard as we could, to make any headway against the wind. The guy in front would keep glancing forward to make sure we weren't going to run into anything, and guided the guy rowing, who would have two inches of snow packed onto his back and neck even as he rowed. We did that for four miles before reaching the take-out...and just as we reached it the snow stopped.
Hottest place I've ever been was this summer, floating the Salmon River in Idaho. We were in the middle of the lower canyon, headed for the Snake River, on the hottest two days of the year (and for all I know, record heat). We heard when we finished the trip that the actual temperature got up to 114 degrees both those days in Lewiston. The lower Salmon River Canyon is all BLACK rock, and that sun beating down on those bare rocks all day made the lower canyon an oven. If a breeze blew, it was just a convection oven. We stopped often and jumped in the river, and drank a LOT of water. But setting up camp in the evening was really bad, too, because there was simply no place to get away from the heat. We'd quickly set up camp, then spend the rest of the evening until well after dark just sitting in the river and drinking beer. I honestly think that if the river hadn't been there to get into we could have died of heat stroke.
Worst storm...I was fishing a local Missouri stream, and there was a big storm coming, but the fishing was terrific and I wasn't ready to quit. Finally the lightning got close, and I paddled back to the car and jumped in. I stopped at the top of the ridge to watch the storm come in, then drove into town. Just as I got to town, the storm hit. I pulled in under a gas station awning, and immediately the awning blew away! Tree limbs were hitting the car. The canoe almost launched itself off the top. It was raining so hard I couldn't see anything, which was just as well. As it turned out, a tornado passed within a quarter mile of me, killing several people.
Worst rain...on (thankfully) the last day of a three day float trip on a river in southern Missouri that flows southward (and that turned out to be important). Big rainstorm started building to the south, downstream. When it hit us, it was honestly raining so hard you couldn't see 20 feet. We kept fishing for a while, and surprisingly the smallmouth were still active. But it just kept raining, and never slacked off for a good hour. By the time it slowed and we could see, we began to notice that all the little ravines were simply gushing water into the stream. Lots and lots of water. The river was rising slowly at first, but we knew that the rain was going on northward, up the river, and there would be a lot more water coming down, so we started paddling hard to get to the take-out. The river was rising faster and getting muddy. By the time we made it to the take-out, it had risen about three feet. We pulled the canoe up onto the concrete boat ramp, with about half of it still in the water, and ran over to our vehicle about 150 feet away, jumped in, and drove it to the ramp...and by the time we got there the canoe was starting to float away. By the time we got it loaded, water was beginning to run across the parking lot, a good 8 feet above normal river level. We barely made it out of the parking lot and onto the hill leading out of the river valley!
One more flood story...this happened back when I was still a teenager. A buddy and I were floating one day; I'd left my car at the take-out, and we'd put in with his vehicle, an International Scout that he'd just gotten and was inordinately proud of. We left his Scout on the gravel bar at the put-in, about three feet above the river level. It came a big rain in the middle of the float, and soon the river was rising. We were floating over water willow beds that would usually be out of the water. We started paddling to the take-out. I wasn't worried about my vehicle, which was in a parking lot a good 20 feet higher than normal river level, but I WAS worried about his Scout. For some reason he never thought about it, and I decided not to mention it...we'd find out the bad news soon enough, and we were paddling to the take-out as quickly as we could anyway, which was pretty quick, since the river had risen several feet. We loaded up, jumped in my car, and took off for the put-in.
You approached it from a higher bench, where you could look down as see the gravel bar, and hopefully his Scout. But when we got there, all we could see was water everywhere--the river had now come up 6 feet or more. No Scout. Then we looked over to the side, where there was a big shed that a gravel dredging company used, and there was his Scout. It turned out that the employees at the gravel company had hooked up a piece of their heavy equipment to the vehicle and dragged it up out of harm's way.
