stardognine

As in the river overflowing it's banks? Well, I have. 😋😁😉

Ya just can't make this stuff up, life is weird.

This happened the night of New Year's Day, along the American River, around 3:00 AM. I was cowboy camping (no tent), and thought I'd left plenty of room for the river, in case it rose a bit. 🙄

It rose alright, but must have been like 5 or 6 feet higher than the bank, in about 4 hours. 😲 Apparently, the rivers will rise way more than just the local rainfall. All the creeks & runoff from other places feed it too, making it really tricky to guess how much it'll rise. 🤔

I lost a bag of groceries and one of my bungie cords for my sleeping bag, lol, but otherwise, I'm fine. Plus I just got a little smarter (hopefully), about sleeping anywhere near a river. 😋😉

I see there was a LOT of crazy stuff happening lately, here in California. I guess I got off with a warning, from Mother Nature. 😉

PedalingWalrus

I got flooded camping on Long trail as the water ran down the mountains and congregated in flat spots like camping spots 😀

also in a grass field with 5 inches of water

Polaris OBark

I had that happen while camping next to the Colorado River just outside of Moab. Fortunately nothing bad happened.

robow

On one of my trips down the C & O Canal trail, I met a couple of fellows that had gotten flooded out. Apparently they camped pretty close to the Potomac River and one of its feeder creeks. They said that they were awakened in the middle of the night by water rushing into their tents and they had barely enough time to get their bikes and most of their belongings to higher ground which meant cutting through some very dense brush uphill. I think one of them said they lost their tent or sleeping bag to the fast moving water.

stardognine

I see now, that we've been getting "bomb cyclones" here too, lately. Or maybe the flooding is a result of the bomb cyclones?

I think bomb cyclone at least sounds cooler than a plain old flood, so I'll call it that. Bomb cyclone. 🙄😁

Polaris OBark

May your rivers be terrestrial rather than atmospheric, and may you cyclones be simple low-pressure systems, and all of your meteorological events be devoid of silly jargon.

saddlesores

yes. indeed.
was camping somewhere in west virginia, or maybe alabama, i forget.
set up camp 20' or so from the water, up a slight embankment.
all was well..........until sometime just after midnight was awakened by a siren...
.....and the sound of floodgates being opened.

oops.

BikeLite

The silly jargon is seen now in weather, astronomy, etc...it's their version of marketing I suppose. These stories always remind me of the Arkansas tragedy at Albert Pike Recreation Area back in about June 2010 where 20 or so people died.

Tourist in MSN

The forecast was for heavy rain followed by a few days of very strong winds. Met another cyclist a few days before that had suggested a campground located in a small community where shopping and restaurants were walking distance. That sounded good.

Campground was an RV park that had a few campsites for tenting. I was the only tenter, thus I was able to try to find the highest ground on a very flat plain, ground was slightly higher near a big tree.
. .



Forecast for rain amount of 10 to 20mm, followed by estimated 10mm, and another 5mm. Or, roughly an inch to an inch and a half. And high winds.




My tent was about the only place that was not under water. The photo is deceiving, the grass was tall enough that some of the area that looked like grass had an inch of standing water.




Different trip, luck was not so good. On a canoe trip near the Canadian border in northern Minnesota, forecast was for heavy rain, we put up the tent where there was good drainage away from the tent into a swamp. But unfortunately enough area drained to that swamp that the swamp filled up and the water accumulated around the tent, and the two of us had a couple inches of water in our three person tent. Fortunately our sleeping bags were synthetic insulation, not down. It only took a day of partly cloudy to dry out.



A scenic sunrise in fog a few days later.

RB1-luvr

wow, those pictures! No thank you.

staehpj1

A friend did canoe trips above the arctic circle. He said there were 40' tides. Some of the pictures were amazing. He showed us slides of a camp on top of a really high hill that later required moving the tents due to the tide reaching them.

andrewclaus

I've never had to relocate, but I've woken up on an island in a flooded campground, just like the photos above.

Hiking the AT in the White Mts, I got stuck between two creeks during a flash flood, just a mile from town. I had to cowboy camp right on the trail tread in the dense NE forest. I was able to hike out in the morning.

mev

I was flooded in a campground on a weekend trip. I had gone overnight to Lockhart State Park when a storm came through and dropped ~6" in Lockhart and up to 14" in parts of east Austin. The site was grassy and pretty level and as I awoke, my pad was still above the water but there was perhaps ~1/2" of water underneath the tent that I could mostly push down on. I waited a bit and then dashed to nearby shelter and waited until it got light. Once light, I retriever and packed up my belongings and cycled back home. On the path home there were three spots where water went over the road. One of them I could wade through, one was a raging torrent of several feet that I detoured and the last was barely so I could ride.

During that storm several hundred houses in Austin were flooded by Onion Creek in what eventually turned out to be a buyout. After the flood and 14" they redrew the flood maps and decided these houses were now in a 25 year flood plain where-as prior they had estimated it as a 100 year. From a variety of funds, the city ended up buying out the houses.

Not bicycling, but I had an incident when hiking in Canyon country of Utah. Our trip went through a canyon where prior to the rainstorm we could mostly walk in bottom of the canyon including occasional wading in shallow puddles. We had camped well enough so we weren't flooded, but we had to replace our normal method of travel to instead walk along banks of the canyon which took a lot more bushwacking. Eventually we got to a spot where things narrowed and we had to cross. In that case, we got a line across and ended up carefully bringing the party through the water one by one while tied to the line and making sure nobody got swept away.

Then there is my childhood memory:. Each Spring Break my family would take our pickup truck camper and travel for a week. Since it was typically cold in CO, this meant a trip to south or west. This was a year that we went to see Big Bend National Park and then on the way back via Dallas. I was perhaps 10 years or so and was enthused enough to want to camp in my tent rather than sleep in the camper. Things started out fine an evening when we were camped in a State Park near Dallas, but a severe thunderstorm came through with thunder and lightning as well as a bunch of rain and wind. It dropped over my tent pole and a lot of rain came in to make everything wet. I was fine and holding the tent pole back up as part of the adventure. However, my parents thought otherwise and made me come back into the camper. I was not happy with that. The next day driving back with the camper, we ended up with a flat tire on the truck. While this was being fixed, we got out my tent and sleeping bag and strung out a line to dry in the sun. So here we were like gypsies along I-35 with a truck tire being replaced while we had a clothesline and tent with things drying in the sun and breeze.

pdlamb

Worst I've had was camping on a boy scout trip on a flat spot that turned out to be the middle of a gully when it rained. Soaked my tent and sleeping bag. Fortunately, I had dry clothes to change into when my assistant scoutmaster noticed I was going hypothermic!

We used to drive through Spring City, TN fairly frequently when I was younger. There's a monument to the scouts who were killed in a flash flood, and Dad pointed out the monument and re-told their story almost every time we passed it.

Clyde1820

Hiked through the Hawaiian Islands, years ago.

Was coming off the Haleakala (Maui) summit, through the rain forest, when it came time to camp for the evening. Had a decent site selected. Or, so we thought. That night, the deluge of all deluges came (of course). Turned our bit of "high" ground into a raging little stream. There simply was nowhere better to place the tents; everyplace else was worse off. I suppose hammocks would have kept us up off such insta-streams.

Didn't lose anything. But, the next day, anything that hadn't been in dry bags was wet. That water intruded everywhere. Took awhile to get a couple pairs of socks and the shoes dry. Good lesson. Could have been worse, I suppose. We could have badly sited the camp inside one of those lava tubes ...

stardognine

A little late in the thread, but here's a couple pics. This is only one of many trees that fell, from the crazy strong winds. It didn't block the MUP, like some did, but it sure squished that fence. 😁

The other pic shows the handicapped fishing pier, near Carmichael. Before the rain got started, the water was a good 10-12 feet below that flooded deck. 😲

The whole area looks weird now, too, because grass is growing, where the drought killed it off previously. 🤔😉

Pratt

At a hiker/biker campsite on the C&O, the site was 20'+ above the Potomac, but there was driftwood in the brush.

Yan 

I got flooded once when it rained overnight and a shallow pool of water formed in the middle of a flat area where my tent was pitched. Woke up with my tent sitting in an inch deep pool. The inside of my tent was dry.

This is why you don't use sh*t tents.

Tourist in MSN

Not a flood story, but on my Canadian Maritimes trip I did not have a sim card for my phone. My only forecasts were where I occasionally had wifi. While on the ferry from Nova Scotia to PEI, I had wifi and checked the forecast. Forecast was for five consecutive days of rain, photo of part of that forecast:



I remembered from my initial planning that there was a hostel in Charlottetown. Using the wifi, I made reservations to stay at the hostel immediately after seeing that forecast. Stayed at the hostel for three nights, which gave me a chance to do my sightseeing in the rain in a historic community that had a dry place to sleep.

Rained for two days before I got to the hostel and was still raining when I left it, but having three nights of a dry place to sleep really made a difference.

Calsun

Even bears are smart enough to head to higher ground at night to sleep. Good idea not to camp along the trail they use to go to feed in the morning. Glacier NP has been setup with campgrounds in the middle of bear trails with disasterous results but the park service refuses to acknowledge they screwed up and move the campgrounds.

Steve0000

Got flooded in a campground in southern Germany once. The water ran down the camp which was on a slope and ended up where the small tents were placed at the bottom. At 10pm, we found our panniers were floating in the tent vestibule and we had a waterbed under the tent. The sealed floor worked well. Shifted the tent about 5m to a small rise and fixed the problem. Next morning, we woke up to find the surrounding tents in deep puddles. From then on, we looked for the highest spot to pitch the tent if there was a forecast of rain.

stardognine

C'mon, bears gotta eat too. Right? 😁😉

It seems to me, we could fix a heck of a lot of things, if the government was on the people's side. 🙄 Heck, they could hire a bunch of kids to do that, as summer jobs.

Calsun

All three branches of government are controlled by the wealthy elites so the "government" works for their interests which has gone very well for them with 1% having 90% of the wealth and paying taxes at a 3% rate. Different in a democracy as in European and Scandinavian countries.

Lambkin55

Worse night's sleep ever, was when we set our tent up in a Riverside Campground outside of Detroit OR on a bike tour.
It rained that night and the water was flowing through our tent. We could do nothing but wait out the rain.

Tourist in MSN

What does that have to do with being flooded?