White Out!

We headed back to Los Gatos on Sunday morning, leaving around 9:20am to avoid the traffic. We knew it would be snowing in the mountains that day but we didn’t reckon on the freak snowstorm that hit.

Less than 15 minutes into the climb out of the valley near Gardenerville it was snowing hard and by the time we turned onto highway 89 the road was two brown tracks in the gathering white. After a couple of nasty slides which took me and the onboard computer all we’d got to correct, we stopped at the junction of 89 and 50 to put on snow chains. There was a team of people charging $30 to put your chains on for you, and since I had never put them on before, I coughed up the money and handed over our chains. It certainly seemed like a rip-off, but at that point we were quite happy to be ripped-off and safe.

And so we started our decent in the blizzard, one car behind the other, crawling at less than 10mph. Sometimes all I could see was the faint outline of the car in front, everything else blotted out by the swirling snow storm. At 3600 feet the snow on the road finally turned to slush and we stopped and I took off the chains. We breathed a sigh of relief and headed on our way.

Alas 5 miles on, the road started to climb up again and by 4000 feet the 4 line highway was a white skating rink once more. I stopped to put on the chains whilst other cars passed me only to spin off the road not more that 50 yards ahead. It was at this point I found out why you pay $30 to have some else put your chains on for you. You have to climb under your car to adjust and secure the chains to the inside of the wheel. This isn’t a lot of fun in a blizzard if you haven’t got waterproof clothes and I spent the rest of the trip soaked to the skin.