Greetings and welcome!
That was quite a weekend around Kosir’s Rafting and Rapids Resort. The Peshtigo River defied lower predictions and the Saturday noon whitewater rafting trip found a river that was at a +12. By Sunday it was + 16 and rising, and at the moment the 10pm Monday USGS gauge shows that it is at +24 and not done yet.
The people that came whitewater rafting had a blast. The river was big and wild and there was plenty of action. There were some great flips and swims at First Drop, and I was there with the pictures and video. (I will have some to share a little later. ) The river was running good and there were a lot of happy people around. I even met a group of site visitors on Sunday that came to give it a try. Nice to meet you guys!
The weather was pretty nice over the weekend. Saturday was warm and mostly sunny. Saturday night brought a couple of waves of thunderstorms, but it cleared out for Sunday. The rain brought fog Sunday morning, but the sun helped warm it up later. It wasn’t as nice as Saturday, but it was still a decent day for this time of year.
Later Sunday afternoon the rain redeveloped, and later on at night we saw all of the big storms that spawned tornadoes in seven or eight counties in Wisconsin.
One of those lines of severe storms went through Forest and Oneida Counties and hit the Peshtigo River Watershed. There were reports of a tornado and damage around Armstrong Creek and a few areas west and a little south of there.
The radar showed the storms dropping 2-3 of rain in a short time in the central and upper Peshtigo River watershed. It was a mean line of storms and they probably dropped a lot of rain.
When I was walking down to the river Saturday there was a lot of snow and ice in the woods. The thunderstorms Saturday night humbled a lot of that for Sunday, and brought a spike in the river that we are seeing now. We are not done yet though. There are still places in the woods with over a foot of snow.
Between the rain and T-storms Saturday night and Sunday night plus the melting of the snow from the warm days, the folks that want to raft the Peshtigo at high water have a lot to look forward to in the short term. My guess at the moment is that we will go over +30 by Wednesday and be in the 20s for next weekend.
The weather for the week and weekend looks very interesting. Today and tomorrow look nice with pleasant days reaching about 60. Around Wednesday a cold front is expected that will bring light rain and a pretty significant drop in temperatures.
The GFS has switched gears in the latest model run. We were looking at a Friday storm that would clear out about noon Saturday. The latest has us in for, are you ready for this, a rain changing to snow storm. It looks like some rain Saturday morning, then as much as 3-6″ of snow. If it changes over sooner, it could be a lot more snow.
Since that model has made so many changes in the last 24 hours, I’d like to see a few consecutive runs of it settling on an scenario before I take it too seriously.
Here are a few rafting photos from the weekend..
Apparently the gallery that I had here used too many resources on the server so I have to prune it back. I will have to work out something different, either making the pictures smaller or using less of them. For those of you on Facebook, the full gallery is on my page there.
Have a good morning and thank you for visiting!
RJB