Worst camping-sort of thing that happened was trying to camp in East Glacier. I bent two tent stakes in an unsuccessful attempt to stake my tent, and then when I tried to use it unstaked, wind came up that actually blew the tent over (with me in it). So about midnight I packed up the tent and just tried sleeping under the stars. You would think that high winds would keep the mosquitos down, but not in Montana. I ended up getting a total of about 2 hours of sleep, and just started the next day really early. Fortunately, I found a gas station not too far away, and its amazing what a large cup of strong coffee can do to your outlook on the day.

Worst weather-related thing was a dirt-road tour in Oklahoma. It was an overnight tour from Tulsa to Lake Eufaula and back. On the way there, my buddy and I took paved highways, and on the way back, we tried to avoid retracing our steps by taking backroads, not all of which were paved. It would have been a fine ride...if there hadn't been two inches of rain in two hours. The first dirt road, going over Tiger Mountain, wasn’t too bad, although the clay soil turned rather slippery when it was wet. But then going north over the Deep Fork River was just terrible. The area around the road is swampy at the best of times, and all of the rain resulted in deep mud puddles that extended all the way across the road. The clay mud also kept clogging up the fenders, which had to be cleaned out every half mile or so until we just decided to remove them. The bridge across the river did turn out to be standing (not all the maps I’d consulted agreed on that), and moreover, being concrete, was the only non-muddy spot within probably ten miles. But north of the river, the road had been carved out by truck tires and 4-wheelers so that it was 3 feet lower than the surrounding ground and full of water. We managed to push the bikes on an ATV track through the woods for a while, but after a mile or two, that returned to the flooded road. At that point, our choices were to either turn back (and probably not make it back to Tulsa until the following day) or carry the bikes and panniers through the swamp. Fortunately, we only needed to carry for about half a mile before the water became shallow enough not to submerge the bottom brackets. In all, it took us over two hours to go a bit more than 5 miles, and by the time we got to the town of Hoffman (where we got back on some proper roads), we were so covered in mud that we looked barely human. And we were still 50 miles from Tulsa.

Looking back on the trip, the slog through the mud even looks a little bit fun, but it was pretty miserable at the time.