Today’s plan had us getting back to Interstate 70 to cross the Eastbound Vail Pass. We will have to climb from the town of Vail at 8120 feet elevation to the crest of Vail Mountain at 10,662 feet. The pass is twelve miles long, and half of that is uphill to reach the peak. My I-phone alarmed a travel advisory this morning. It said it snowed last night, is still snowing, and there will be snow showers most of the day on the pass. Packed ice covers the road, and there are gusting 40-50 mph winds making driving conditions dangerous and treacherous. The last word did it for me. So, Peg and I are sitting it out for another day watching all the adventurous drivers pass us by headed for the pass. At my age I take words like treacherous seriously. I no longer ache for the adventure of driving in hazardous conditions to get some where. Another day on the road will not hurt us at all, while one slip off a road above 8000 feet might hurt us real bad.
This is the third time Peggy and I have experienced poor driving conditions while commuting to and from Arizona. The first time we followed a storm front across the west from Flagstaff, AZ to Albuquerque, NM. Each morning we awoke to a cloudless sunny day only to catch the storm in the early afternoon, and be shagged off the Interstate by the State police. The second time we met a snow storm in Oklahoma while driving west. We sat a day waiting for the storm to pass. The next morning we bravely got on the road to learn that the road was hard packed ice for one hundred and twenty miles. We holed up again for two more days to wait for the storm to pass, and for the ice to melt. Last year, our plan had us on this very same route, but a winter storm advisory (I didn’t know that late April thru early May is still considered winter in these parts, and they are serious about it.) caused me to detour back south going two hundred and fifty miles out-of-the-way to get away from the delivered twelve inches of snow dumped on Vail Pass to Denver. The third time is now.
What do they say? “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
Filed under: Biography, family, Memories | Tagged: Insanity, Interstate 70, Snow, Vail, Vail Pass Colorado | Leave a comment »
