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Published: February 19th 2011
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It is part of the California/Nevada experience; driving Donner Summit in the snow.
Skiers do it. Truckers do it all the time. It’s an interstate, I-80, so it’s reasonably wide and well maintained. It’s not like you’re completely heading out into the wilderness or going it alone.
But you are still driving a car up and then down an icy mountain. You’re still crossing 7,000 feet in the blowing snow with jackknifed trucks along the route. And you’re doing it over a pass named quite specifically for horrible starving death on a frozen mountain. Anyone who says they aren’t gripping the wheel tightly is either lying or utterly careless.
I had this joy on Thursday of this week, on a return drive from Reno to the Bay Area. The weather forecast was similar on through to Sunday, so it didn’t pay to wait a day or bide my time. It was all epic snow and wind over the mountains.
Chain requirements can sometimes be brief, extending just over the summit itself, i.e. from Truckee to Cisco Grove, for example. Today they extended from the already heavily snowing state line (Terrible’s) all the way to Colfax. That’s 70
Truckee
This was still the easy part miles, at probably an average speed of 25 miles per hour.
Chain Monkeys receive both my thanks and my money. How some of these guys can keep a cigarette lit out in those conditions is beyond me. My job on a day like this is to manage three or four hours of music, turn on the heat, and keep it slow and straight. Heading up the Truckee River valley the temperature had only just dipped below freezing, but it was dropping fast.
Around Floriston, where the highway comes out the top of the valley into the mountainous expanse, the wind howled unimpeded. The fluffy snow of the lower valley had largely turned to frozen sleet, and windblown whiteouts enveloped several of the major turns. Dirty sludge filled the roadway. My dashboard told me that the temperature had now dropped down into the 20s.
The State Agricultural Inspection Station at Truckee Meadows was barely visible in the blowing snow. I hardly noticed as the highway rolled on through Truckee itself as the white blowing haze had consumed almost all visibility. My attention shrank down to focus upon following the preceding vehicle’s tracks in the snowy roadway. Around Truckee,
Oops
Frozen windshield wipers the temperature fell to 23 degrees.
And this is about when I started to notice my windshield wipers failing on me. Everything else in the car seemed to be working just fine, the heat was good, the music was cool, the steering was easy and I wasn’t slipping as long as I kept my speed under 25. But I’ll be damned if the wipers just weren’t cutting it anymore. They were caking up with ice and leaving frozen filthy arcs where a clean and clear windshield should be. Eventually these arcs took over the entire forward view.
There was nowhere to pull over, so slightly panicked about how much worse this situation might become, I adopted a tactic of following the dark silhouette of the big rig trudging along ahead of me. The road now was a solid sheet of white with a haze of snow blowing wildly across it. Only my friend the vague dark trucker, and the constant ghostly pine trees moving by provided any contrast. The temperature eventually bottomed out at 19 degrees.
The traffic at this point had thinned out almost completely. I could see no one behind me. Drifts on both sides
had severely narrowed the road, and so with really no choice, I simply stopped right there and flipped on the hazard lights. I got out into the wet blowing cold and hurried to break those blocks of ice off of my spindly wipers. I scraped the wiper point as clean as I could with my nails and numb finger tips, and then hopped back into the car, slopping snow and ice in with me all across the interior. Drizzles of melt water began to flow through my hair and down my neck and face. I had a head full of snow and didn’t even know it.
To my enormous relief, my impromptu cleaning worked, and I was rewarded with a clear windshield view for the first time in nearly an hour. I stopped and did this two or three more times throughout the course of the drive. A little more aggressive use of the defroster certainly helped keep the problem at bay.
As did the increasing temperature. Donner Summit itself was frigid, but as I dropped in elevation thereafter, the temperature gradually increased. Around 27 degrees, ice on the wipers was suddenly no longer a problem. I could
see fine, and my continuing challenge became quite simply to avoid fellow travelers in drifts beside me, and two or three accidents which caused unexpected wintery mountain traffic jams.
The temperature eased, but the snow did not. On past Cisco Grove, it was still coming down hard. Quite majestically, the road coursed through a valley of tall pines lined up like snowy sentries. There were stretches of this ordeal which were actually very beautiful.
At the high exposed Emigrant Gap the wind and snow were again howling. And then down to Nyack, still snowing. Dutch Flat, Gold Run, 3,000 feet, and Secret Town Road. The road ice had turned to slushy dirty ruts again, but the snow was still coming down, hard. It had been hours, and I was getting to the point of being tired of this adventure.
Finally at Highway 174, Colfax, the haze lifted. The snow dropped to just a light dusting and the roadway turned, for the most part, back to pavement again. To my greatest relief, the Chain Monkeys once again appeared. “Move a foot forward. Turn your wheel to the right. Turn to the left. Back up a foot.” And it
was done. I felt like a teenager with his braces just removed. My Camry felt like a sports car.
I was now left with merely a two-hour rainy drive home from the foothills to the Bay Area. I was tired and hungry, but emerging after five hours on the mountain, but I was glad to have it.
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