I was in the Freightshaker right behind Denise in her F-350/30 foot trailer.
We had just inched forward a truck length or so, and even though we were barely moving, her front wheels locked up in the slippery conditions when she applied the brakes.
We had come off the snow and mud covered mountain with almost no issues with what should have been the most difficult and risky part of our trip home, only to be ambushed by heavy snow, lots of traffic and poor visibility as we dropped into Prescott Valley.
Little cars zipped and zoomed all around us, often darting into the space we would leave in front of us as a stop buffer zone, adding to the stress.
As we cleared Chino Valley in the fading light of the day made even darker by lowering clouds, the snow began to fall harder still.
I was fighting my own issues all the way through town-while the Freightshaker felt rock steady on the road, the air-powered windshield wipers were doing an absolutely terrible job of getting the snow off of the nearly vertical windshield I was struggling to see through.
Once we cleared Paulden and picked up speed into the increasingly heavy snowfall, my situation only got worse. The flat glass was like some sort of snow magnet, and the wipers couldn’t move fast enough to shed the snow. Soon, the snow built up enough to just lift the wiper blades off the glass, and then it was just using a pile of snow to wipe the glass. It was like looking through glass blocks most of the time. I could see a blurry image of the road and our trailer some 50 feet ahead of me, and then about every two seconds the pile of snow attached to the wiper blades would go by and give me a half-second glimpse that was reasonably clear of the scene in front of me.
There was no good spot to pull over to try and remedy the issue, and we now felt were were in a race to get to the I-40 before the storm shut the 89 down and stranded us on the spot.
That would mean a long, miserable night parked right in the middle of the highway.
So we forged ahead as best as we could.
I had the defroster on high to keep the windshield warm to melt the snow, and found that if I gave the whole mess a squirt or two of windshield washer fluid now and then, my visibility issues were manageable.
While stressful, we actually made pretty decent time up the 89 until we got just a few miles south of the 40, where we ran into a parking lot of vehicles stacked up in the northbound lane ahead of us.
As we neared the 40, the light faded further, visibility dropped more, and the snow came down steadily.
The line of vehicles would inch forward a few truck lengths at a time, then stop for several minutes.
Some of the south bound vehicles sporadically going by us were getting squirrelly in the snow and slush, and it seemed inevitable one of them would loose control and either hit a parked northbound vehicle or land in the ditch and make a bad situation worse.
To add to the mess, several people decided to get out of their vehicles and walk up the middle of the road to see what was going on, apparently oblivious to the traffic that was coming at them that was struggling to stay in their lane. How one of them didn’t get creamed by a car is beyond me.
Several people ahead of us decided that further travel North wasn’t going to work out for them, and they elected to do a three or four point U-turn and head back south to where they’d just left. Which was fine-except every one of them was slipping and sliding when turning around and one two wheel drive truck nearly got stuck blocking both lanes.
Finally, we could see the I-40, and intermittent West bound traffic, with the east bound lanes at a standstill and vehicles parked as far West as we could see-confirming the road reports we had that Eastbound 40 was closed, but westbound at this point was still open.
But now a strange thing was happening in front of us: north bound drivers were confronted with two options-turn around and head back south, or take the 40 westbound. That’s it. One or the other. There was an ADOT employee in bright yellow snow gear out in the middle of the highway letting people know that was their options. And instead of picking one or the other and making tracks-despite the evidence of what their options were having been clear well before the ADOT guy officially told them-they all stopped for a minute or so undecided. Meanwhile the weather was getting worse by the minute and the line of stopped vehicles growing.
What a circus!!!
We were getting antsy and concerned that the 40 westbound was going to close with us practically on top of it.
Finally, we got to the ADOT guy, and we wasted zero time gettin on the 40 westbound!
Visibility still sucked, and we weren’t going anywhere fast, but we were super happy to be moving closer to home again.
As we moved west and away from the center of the storm, conditions began to improve and we started picking up speed as we rolled on into the now-setting sun.
There had been a number of serious accidents in the eastbound lanes, and that side of the freeway was a long, messy parking lot of stranded motorists. Many would be there for 13 hours or more, according to later news reports.
We broke free of the storm just east of Seligman, and rolled into their now wet and muddy KOA to dump the holding tanks on the trailer.
Exhausted and starving, we resisted the call of chicken fried steak at the local restaurant in favor of getting back on the freeway and continuing west with what little daylight remained for fear the storm would somehow overtake us and strand us again.
After a 15 plus hour day, with nearly five hours spent driving in the storm-we finally rolled through our front gates and shut the now trashed and muddy trucks down.
Our gaggle of dogs were at least as excited to see us as we were them.
After a couple of drinks, a very late dinner, and much needed showers, we crawled into bed at our house finally and passed out.
Have I mentioned there’s a reason we normally don’t do jobs in the rain or snow?!?!