We had a terrifying drive from SF through the Sierras to Reno. It was quite a bit worse than your vid here, we never saw asphalt, and we had to drive ~20ft. behind semis in their tracks to keep things going. The snow was too thick to drive in at speed after a couple of minutes, reliably.
We were told at the bottom of the canyon that we needed to turn around because we didn’t have chains, and we meant to hit the exit to get chains, but missed it and didn’t dare turn around.
Turns out we made it, unlike several other unlucky folks on the way. And it wasn’t even raining when we left SF that morning!
HGV drivers can be a disgusting species. I used to work on an industrial estate near a motorway, and a lot of drivers would stop-over there rather than go to the proper rest stop (where they had to pay). They made up for the lack of facilities by shitting into wads of that blue paper you find at petrol stations and chucking it out of their windows.
My dad now lives in what is called the “Snow Belt of Indiana”: northern Indiana is at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, so it gets some extreme weather year-round. I grew up driving to and from Minnesota via Wisconsin multiple times every winter and have been one of the last or even THE last car on the highway before state troopers closed it due to snow storms. I’m no stranger to driving in the stuff, but it was not until I had to drive in the Snow Belt that I learned the life-saving trick of using the hazard lights. You can always see when someone finally gets it on those roads: they’ll be driving along, the only car/truck without the hazards flashing, until the light bulb goes off in their head (hah!) and they realize that they’re NOTICING the cars with the hazards on…and their hazards go on too.
Michigan City, Indiana is the only place I’ve ever been caught in a white-out so bad that you couldn’t see a semi with hazards flashing when it was 15 feet in front of your vehicle. That snow squall didn’t even have the courtesy of producing some purple lightening.
Yup. That pretty much describes driving in winter in that area of the country.
I’ve driven all over New England in winter too. Yes, it’s bad, but there’s something about the micro-climate in northern Indiana that just takes things to the next level.
Soft mud seems like an oxymoron. It’s just “mud”, isn’t it? I mean, if it wasn’t soft, wouldn’t it be called something besides mud? Like “dirt clods” or something?
