It's been just over a week now since our big snow storm and we are still dealing with all the repercussions of it. The biggest side effect of the snow for us is mud -- LOTS of mud!
To get to our house, you have to travel about a mile on a dirt road, partially uphill. We've had mud before when there have been big rain storms (for example, see here for the story about when the school bus got stuck in the mud), but we've never seen it like this. We had so much snow that is melting and has nowhere to go and no hot warm sun to dry everything out. Then, on top of that, we got another snow storm this past week of several more inches (causing a 2-hour late start at school the next morning) which is just adding to the mess. And it's supposed to maybe snow again Sunday night.
After the first storm, I didn't dare take the van out because of the slippery roads. Monday morning I drove the kids to school in the 4WD truck, but by Tuesday I'd decided the van would probably be okay. We did fine that morning, but by Tuesday afternoon it had warmed up enough to melt more snow and make the road really muddy. I had to pick the kids up Tuesday and we came up the hill to the last corner (which is the worst in terms of mud). We went around the corner and didn't go any further -- the wheels just spun and spun in that mud. I was able to back down the hill, so we tried it again -- and got stuck. Back down we went a couple more times and finally I just gunned it as much as I dared and we made it through the worst spot and back to the house. The van got a good coating of mud on it from all that tire-spinning and now it just sits in the garage (still covered wtih mud). We don't dare take it out again until the road dries up a bit.
Here is the truck after driving through some mud -- it's actually looking pretty clean to me here!
But the road is not drying out -- if anything it just gets worse and the snow continues to fall and then melt. So we are limited to sharing the truck between Brian and I and having to work around the fact that nobody else is coming up to the house -- not the school bus, the UPS truck, the trash truck, etc. It's going to be an interesting next few weeks!
I tried to take a few pictures yesterday and this morning of the road -- there are several "bad" spots and now even with the truck in 4WD you do a lot of slipping and sliding around! It's hard to capture what it's like, but here are a few attempts:
2 comments:
Yuck! Thanks for not making me drive in that. I would hate to be stuck in it. By the way, we aren't coming home from Denver today, too much snow. We'll come tomorrow!
Amazing weather lately! We were in southern utah when (what I think is) this same storm came through, and the people down there just scratched their heads and wondered what to do. I always think exciting weather is lots of fun - until it becomes inconvenient (which happens pretty quick).
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