I hit snowstorm 2 around 5 o'clock in Oregon. This one didn't dump a ton of snow, but what it did dump froze to the freeway immediately. At one point I was pretty sure it was OK to pass the overly-cautious car in front of me, but just as the thought went through my brain I started sliding. It went a little like this:
In the end, my truck stopped perpendicular to the freeway, but still enough on the freeway that I didn't need a tow-truck to continue my journey. Incidentally, this happened near "Dead man's Pass." A horrible name for such a scary portion of the freeway. After that I fell in line behind the Oncoming Semi until we came to fair weather.
It might seem a little dumb, but I thought I'd take a picture of what the roads looked like. Can you see how shiny the road is? That's because it's pretty much sheer ice!A few hours later I made it to the Hanford Reach area. It was pretty sparsely populated. I found some entrances, but they were closed (in the scariest way, there were flood lights and signs warning that they could search any cars they wanted to, and there were rumble strips in the middle the the road that made it sound like your tires were shot out when you ran over them). Feeling very dejected, I decided to press on to Mt. Rainer. Looking back at it, there really wasn't any other choice. There was nowhere to stay in that area (except a private camp ground that looked like it was managed by murderers, seriously), and according to Google Maps, Mt. Rainier was only about 1 1/2 hours away.
Well, in between Hanford Reach and Mt. Rainier I ran into Snowstorm 3. And it was a doozy. As I drove through Yakima, Washington I scoped out campsites, but the state park there was closed, and the R.V. Park looked lame, so I kept on keeping on. White Pass lies between Yakima and Middle Of Nowhere Washington, and it was quite snowy. As scary as it was driving along Highway 12 peering over the edge of the cliff at Rimrock Lake, it was also kind of wonderful. Through this 2-3 hour portion of my journey I only passed two other vehicles, going the other direction. It was really the definition of solitude. Just me, the snow, and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. It was great. Then I reached the road that would take me to Mt. Rainier and it was closed! I was disappointed, again, and tired (I'd been driving for 13 hours by this point), so I decided to sleep in the first place I found.
I got a lot of crap for that one time I took Gus on a snow-mobiling trail, so I thought I'd include a picture of a clearly closed road (as pictured above). That pile of snow, in addition to the road barriers, tell me that I cannot take my truck any further down that road. There wasn't really a town nearby, and as I tried to press on the wind started blowing and making it hard for my tired eyes to discern the correct lane on the road, so I opted to sleep at a rest area. Now, before anyone starts to worry, I'm still alive. As I weighed my options there, at 2:00 in the morning, I knew that statistically my odds of getting in a drowsy-driving accident were high (it's just as bad as drunk driving), while my odds of being murdered at a rest stop (particularly on a rest stop along a state road) were limited mostly to urban legends, so I stopped and fell asleep. As I was falling asleep I went through the scenarios that would result in my rest-stop-death, I figured if there was someone around this rest area, in an unincorporated portion of Washington adjacent the the Tatoosh Wilderness Area, in the middle of a snowstorm, they would be absolutely crazy and would inevitably kill me. So I pulled the pepper spray out of my glove box and fell asleep.
I woke up 6 hours later feeling so much better. I wasn't killed by a scary Pacific-Northwest-Brand Serial Killer (Dad's biggest fear), my stuff was all wrapped up in a tarp, and I was feeling pretty good. The snow had stopped, the plows had come through, and I had survived the night...warm too. Here's how Gus looked in my lonely rest area.
Having gotten most of a night's sleep, I was ready to press on to the Olympic Peninsula. ----------------
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2 comments:
Sometimes it's better that I not know the dire circumstances you put yourself in until after you have survived them. This is one of those times.
This sounds like a horrible start to a vacation, and I don't understand how you get away with continually going on these adventures by yourself. Anytime I protest, Mom tells me that you are an adult and we can't stop you. I HATE that. I'm the boss.
Glad you lived though, and good call on the rest stop. Scary, but good call.
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