Three especially famous Chinook folk tales are probably known in some form by most people in southern Alberta from childhood stories.
A man rode his horse to church, only to find just the steeple sticking out of the snow. So, he tied his horse to the steeple with the other horses, and went down the snow tunnel to attend services. When everybody emerged from the church, they found a Chinook had melted all of the snow, and their horses were now all dangling from the church steeple.
A man was riding his sleigh to town when a chinook overcame him. He kept pace with the wind, and while the horses were running belly-deep in snow, the sleigh rails were running in mud up to the buckboard. The cow tied behind was kicking up dust.
A man and his wife were out during a Chinook. The wife was heavily dressed and the man was wearing summer clothes. When the couple had returned home, the man had frostbite, and the woman had heatstroke.
When Robert Heinlein was describing the behavior of a cat, in “The Door Into Summer”, which was going from one door of a farmhouse to the next outside door, looking for one that opened onto better weather, I was nodding my head in understanding.
I grew up here in Maryland, you see. When it was raining on one side of the house, by the time you got to the other to open the door, and had moved that far south or east, the weather could be entirely different at that door.
Rainbows had a habit of showing up around here like moths around an outdoor light. Almost half the time, they were wearing their garments inside-out, having gotten dressed in a hurry in the changeable weather.