Yeah. Colorado is the same. There are a LOT of people moving here And worse are the skiers that fly in and rent a car with shitty ‘all’ season tires. They are clueless and shut down roads all the time.
Some of the locals are just as bad to be honest. There is no need to go 80 mph when the speed limit is 65. But oh no, They can’t possibly stand to have a vehicle in front of them.
I drive icy mountain roads all the time. It’s pretty much all I do. Seeing these cars in the ditch or off in a field like so much balled up aluminum foil reminds me time and time again to take it easy and be careful.
Wisconsin. We get lake-effect snow, too. We get a lot of it. ‘t’s been snowing constantly for days, only stopping for an hour or two at a time. Very unusual in mid-November. I suppose since it’s the holiday season, it’s more bearable to deal with, and so far we aren’t too buried, but the snow just keeps comin’.
Each year I like the snow a little less. Fortunately, each year it has been snowing a little less. It was eight feet high in parts of my driveway a decade ago. Last year I only shovelled a handful of times.
How to deal?
Dress for the weather that there is.
Keep a shovel, brush, deicer and sand or kitty litter in the car. Join CAA. Buy good windshield fluid and salt. Pretzels too.
Stay inside when possible.
Go skiing. Consider skating or snowshoeing. Decide this is too much work. Drink some whiskey instead. I never much liked Caesars. Or butter tarts.
Get really good at winter driving by doing it a lot. Don’t go fast or too slow and don’t slam on the brakes.
Complain about the snow. Doesn’t help much.
Be glad you live near the US some distance from a big lake. South Ontario does not usually get the snow they get in, say, Montreal or New Brunswick or in Western Canada, but they complain about it much more. Pussies.
I remember our household (eight people, each paying rent on one room, sharing the kitchen and other communal spaces) tromping across Smithtown, eastern Long Island in ~13° freezycold with serious snowbergs still piled up, to all descend upon the Mexican restaurant for margarita pitchers and fajitas.
I have that problem, except some mornings I’m leaving at 4:30 am. I occasionally get kidded about the “trench” I dig from my parking spot to the road. Fortunately, it’s not a great distance. I just take “nibbles” of the snow and work slowly but steadily, breaks if needed.
I have a sister who has lived in Buffalo 40 years now. According to her, it’s always been like that. Not only are they in lake effect, they’re also downwind of Niagara Falls which puts a hella lot of moisture into the air. Global warming isn’t helping, but it’s not the root cause of all the snow in that location.
I carry a snow shovel in my vehicle, among other emergency supplies. Including spare gloves and socks (wet clothing is Very Bad and how I got some minor frostbite at one point).
Living in a town the street get plowed and salted. Very rarely I get snowed in, the last time I recall was the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011.
How do we deal with it? Well… you get cultural knowledge like putting your wipers in the air before the storm so they don’t freeze to the windshield, checking vehicle fluids in the cold, keeping tools to get snow and ice off your vehicle, how to dress for the weather, your local government (if you live in a town) will have street-clearing equipment and if you don’t live in town you either have a four wheel drive or your own plow or both.
I always enjoy seeing jeeps, 4WD pickup trucks, and other such obnoxious vehicles that have been going way too fast and skidded into the ditch. Sometimes they’ve managed to flip over, too.
Western New England here. Too far away from Buffalo to get much lake effect snow, but we get a foot or three in a big storm. We live on a farm, which means you plow your own driveway and barn yards and then you plow your old neighbor’s. The township takes care of the gravel road down to the salted paved road. We like to snowshoe in the woods.
Personally I enjoy winter, especially the snow. We now get a lot of ice in late winter because of thaws, which is the result of climate change, and ice just sucks. No joy in ice.
We have eight cords of firewood stacked next to the back door, and keep the big soapstone stove lit most of the time now. But we don’t get the cold that real inlanders do. Rarely gets worse than 15 below here, and it’s more usually hovering around zero most of the winter.
Just got the snow tires on the vehicles last week. Snow tires and 4WD are the rule around here. I’d say every other car is a Subaru.
Nothing obnoxious about a 4 wheel drive (well, as long as it isn’t lifted 2 feet). Plenty of obnoxious drivers though. Where I live and even in town, 4x4 is pretty much a requirement.
I agree, and sorry about the implied disparagement. What amuses me is these assholes with gigantic tires on their 4WD pickups that obviously have no purpose other than cosmetic, who drive far too fast for the conditions and end up overturned in the ditch.
In deep-snow country, 4WD and good snow tires are of course necessary. And in those places, most residents know how to drive in bad weather.
Yep, 4 wheel drive is no help at all if all 4 wheels are on ice.
A couple winters ago I was driving my Jeep after it snowed and sleeted a little. I was on a 40mph surface street and realized it was a sheet of ice, so I was doing 20-25mph, being very cautious. There was a red light up ahead so I lightly tapped my brakes early, just to see how slippery it was. And my Jeep became a giant curling stone. I started sliding, slowly but with no resistance whatsoever. I slid sideways across the other lane (thankfully there was no oncoming traffic) and was heading for a metal sign on the grass strip on the side of the road. I braced for my Jeep to take the sign out when one of my tires must have caught a patch of dry pavement, because my Jeep suddenly flipped 180 degrees and I came to a gentle stop in the opposite lane, facing the opposite direction I had been going.
What I have found after driving for 30 years in mountain snow and ice is that the engineers that designed the vehicle actually picked a good tire size. Oversized tires mean less pressure per sq/inch on the ground for icy conditions. If your going mudding or rock crawling the rules vary of course YMMV.
The most important thing is proper tires, and good driving skills (when you don’t get what you want you get experience). That’s the only thing that will save the day.
4x4 is necessary for many of us too. I couldn’t get to my house without it 6 months out of the year.
I’m a ridiculously ‘conservative’ driver w/all wheel drive, but black ice got me, on the interstate, on Thursday. The car just magically levitates a few mm off the road surface and goes on a journey of its own, ignoring any inputs from you.
Luckily, I wasn’t going all that fast, but I did punch into the cable barrier in the center median. Had to be towed home.
Oh, the ignominy of it all.
Before I got out of my car, three other vehicles had joined me – the closest coming within a few feet of hitting me. State Police checked on me and said there were dozens of spin-outs within a couple miles of me.
Lesson learned … way too late? I don’t drive a lot and simply ‘forgot’ that tires – even tires with very low mileage on them – will dry and harden in not-too-many years. I looked online. Conventional wisdom says that 6-8 years is probably too old. Aside from other risks, it makes winter weather driving a bunch riskier.
It was a doctor’s appointment, and everything in my bones – early AM – was telling me to reschedule. I should have.
If the conditions merit and you have a choice, staying home is quite often the better choice.
My Wife and I replace our tires every 2 years. We run snow tires year round. It’s sort of pointless for us to change over. I’m not recommending that for everyone of course, it’s just that our snow season is longer than our… summer season.
My living-in-snow era is now behind me but I’ve driven 4WD and AWD in Central US snow conditions for a couple decades.
The thing so many amateurs forget is that every car and truck on the road has 4-wheel stop. AWD/4WD is all about 4-wheel go.
Most of the time in crappy conditions (@enipla’s rather extreme situation excepted) going is the easy part; it’s the stopping that’s hard. And AWD/4WD is zero extra help with that hard part.
I wouldn’t call my driving “ridiculously conservative”, but I’m not a crazed speed demon in the winter either. I had a similar event one morning going to work.
Cruising on the freeway at 50mph-ish in the inside lane on a layer of compacted snow and ice and meltwater. Partway up a long hill suddenly my 4WD Bronco started sideways. Being a tall & short-coupled vehicle, it diverges quickly. At first I overcorrected and the fishtailing got worse. Got lucky & minimized the inputs about as I got off the ice patch and she straightened right out & I continued none the worse for wear. But yeah, that was real close & I’m pretty sure a few other cars behind me visited the barrier. Which I surely would have done if I’d been going slightly faster or the ice patch had been slightly longer.
Whooo boy, black ice is bad. Bridges in particular. Oddly I don’t have much problem with it in Colorado. I did ‘float’ over a bridge in Kansas (I know what DavidNRockies is talking about) one time coming back from a road trip. I hit it on a bridge. “Don’t touch nothing, brakes, steering, nothing.” Would be my advice. I only ended up only about 10 degrees out of alignment with the direction of travel.
My driveway is a different animal all together. I’ve fallen a few times when just a little bit of snow covers ice. Once, going to my shed, I fell and could not get enough traction to get up. It was definitely weird. I. Could. Not. Stand. I ‘slid’ to my shed, found some salt, and spread it in front of me to get back to the house. It was… interesting.
As I said, when you don’t get what you want, you get experience.
Some of the worst winter weather I’ve ever encountered was in the south. Georgia and Louisiana. Freezing rain. I’ll see your black ice and raise you.
That stuff has a friction coefficient lower than goosegreased teflon. I watched from the Greyhound bus that a 2 mph skittering car had bounced off of as the next four cars attempted to slow down enough to creep past and each one slipped and banged into the car before them, including the police car that showed up to deal with us all. Watched the police officer open his car door, hold onto it while carefully stepping out, then fall anyway as his boots went out from under him.
Right. Heavy lake snow events are common in locations that are on the downwind side (usually south or east) of the Great Lakes. The Buffalo area, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northwestern Indiana, etc., frequently get pummeled by big snowfalls; it just so happens that this one is particularly intense.
Here in Saskatchewan, semi-arid, we don’t get a lot of snow like in the mountains and Lakes.
But once the snow arrives, it stays. And builds up. And packs into ice. Generally melts by late March, but I’ve had snow in my backyard until May occasionally.
I’m waiting to get the snows on. Left it late this year so now I’m in the queue with all the other late tire people.
When we get a blizzard, there’s a fair bit of shovelling. We’ve had snow services and I’ve got a guy I need to call to see if he’s still available for on-call until March.
PS — Like @wolfpup , there’ll be no toasting De Gaulle until the bastard apologises for interfering in Canadian politics.
Surely there’s another famous Frenchman with a less odious reputation in Canada. The joke doesn’t work without toasting a famous Frenchman.
Marshal Pétain perhaps? De Gaulle certainly didn’t care for him, so he sort of qualifies as “my enemy’s enemy”. Louis Renault who, some 125 years later, is still playing a monster practical joke on the French public? Ferdinand de Lesseps?
Best of all, Brigitte Bardot?!? Now there’s a thought that’ll keep a Canadian man warm on a snowy night.
ETA: Although wiki now informs me that in her recent years she’s turned into a racist figure of the French far-right. So perhaps not as toastable as all that.
Hmmm: this toastable French person is getting harder to find than I expected.
This. In my part of Minnesota, we don’t get big snow dumps often, but when we do, we have learned to follow Buffalo and Rochester, NY’s lead. We have snow emergency routes that are the first to get plowed, then the side streets, then the alleys. Dump trucks are used to remove snow when the streets get too narrow to navigate. There are snow emergency parking rules to know and follow if you don’t want your car towed. When the highways get closed, we just hunker down at home. You don’t want to have less than a week’s worth of food in your home, just to be safe.
I recall being at a friend’s home in Duluth years ago, coming back from Fort Frances, ONT. We were too broke to stay at a hotel so we drove on a closed highway to Duluth. It was a scary drive. I kept offering to write a bad check so we could stay inside for the night but the driving person swore we would make it to his brother’s. We got there about 7 hours after starting out and detaching our trailer as soon as we got to the top of the big hill down to the lake, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to safely tow it down the hill. We found his brother’s and stuck in for two days due to the storm stalling out over the lake. Brother and his roomie (bachelors both) didn’t have enough food for all so the roomie braved the storm, wearing a racing helmet to protect his head from the storm, and came back with hotdogs from the convenience store. We lived on that, and watched movies and played board games until the storm ended. Digging out took the better part of a day and we drove on south to discover that Minneapolis was still digging out as well. I’m grateful we got out alive, with nothing but sore arms and a couple of days of missed work to show for it.
And worse are the skiers that fly in and rent a car with shitty ‘all’ season tires. They are clueless and shut down roads all the time.