Avoiding Snow Adventures
We told each other, last February when we had adventures putting on chains on Snoqualmie Pass, that had we been young and dumb college students we wouldn't have obsessed about it.
Well, we aren't so young anymore, to cavalierly just go over the pass without checking the weather and the pictures offered by Washington State DOT. Nor are we as dumb, like putting chains on the car and then driving on bare pavement. (I didn't, but a 6 hour trip between Seattle and Pullman 44 years ago turned into a 12 hour trip because of everyone else did.) Plus we are aware of our own mortality. Plus we had Laurie and Deki in the car with us.
So instead we obsessed about it for a week before making the trip.
We didn't have a choice about dates. Deki was scheduled for labs, an echocardiogram, and a doctor visit starting at 12:45 on Thursday January 6. Then he was to get his port out on Friday, January 7. And we normally travel over Snoqualmie Pass.
19 inches of snow fell on the pass on Monday, closing it. They got it open right away -- it is worth some $10 million dollars a day in wages and revenue -- but 12 inches fell on Tuesday. Some 30 more inches were predicted over the next few days. Fortunately, the long route, Via I-84 to Portland, and then north on I-5, only had rain predicted. However, this is a 7-8 hour drive, and that meant we left at 4 am or so.
If we were young and dumb college students, we just night have done that. Instead we left on Wednesday around 9:30am to have as much driving in the light as possible without getting up too early in the morning.
At The Dalles, we encountered rain so I turned on the windshield wipers. About Hood River, I had to turn them on high, and then they stopped syncing. They didn't knock each other off the car, so we could still keep on going. At Troutdale, we tried to fix them, which resulted in the driver's side working and the passenger side not doing anything at all. This is great for the driver, but it drove me nuts as a passenger.
We made it to the hotel about dinner time, hung out a little, and went to sleep. I woke up to a text from a friend: "Did you get to Seattle yesterday?...the pass will remain closed until Saturday." So I looked up the WSDOT website: All 3 passes are closed! (Including Stevens and White; four if you include Blewett) (Chinook and North Cascades were closed until spring a couple months ago, so they don't figure in this.) Well, I guess we are going home by way of Portland...but the Oregon trip check website shows I-84 closed because of a landslide.
If we had waited to leave until Thursday, everything would have been cancelled.
NOW I obsessively check all the roads home all day Thursday. And realize, since all the roads east are closed, that grocery store shelves on the east side are soon going to empty. I suggested to friends that I stock up for them over here, and one suggested toilet paper.
At least we were able to get the windshield wipers fixed. It was just a loose screw.
The landslide was cleared Friday morning, so I dropped Laurie and Deki off at the hospital and went back to the hotel to do some more obsessive checking. And packed. The passes are now closed until Sunday. As I checked out of the hotel, the clerk casually mentioned that I-5 was closed near Centralia because of flooding. Google maps showed a detour that added an hour to the trip. But we turned that into 2, because it took 3 tries to find a place with open bathrooms. And, of course, by the time we got back onto I-5 at Highway 12, it was open again.
We got home at 9 pm, after 9 hours of driving.
But we are home.
(Snoqualmie is due to open Sunday. $50 million later. I-5 is now under repair.)
posted by Marion @ 10:19 PM
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