This morning, Andy and I left the house at 7 am.
It was snowing. It has been snowing since yesterday, when they closed down all the lifts.
The roads weren't great. They weren't terrible, but they weren't great.
Andy dropped me off at the bus stop to pick up the shuttle.
I fell in the parking lot. Ouch!
The shuttle, about 1/4 full, pulled out.
Almost immediately, we hit absolute white-out conditions on Highway 89.
It looked like this:
That's the driver's back and seat. See what's missing? Yep- anything out the window. There was a safety bar behind and next to the driver. That's my hand, clutching it.
The bus grew silent. The music went off. My knuckles whitened. I became aware of everyone else's slightly labored breathing. The radio crackled.
Then this:
See the two tiny dots just above the driver's head? Those are headlights on the correct side of the road. Small sigh of collective relief. Every few minutes, two small, washed out dots would appear and we would know we were on the right side of the road.
Time passed slowly, my hands and shoulders getting knotted up from tension.
We turned into the access road to the hill. There were two jackass-ettes stopped completely in the middle of the road. They said that the road was closed. We were confused, and the driver radioed to the top- nope, not closed yet. Someone (maybe me?) made a joke about us hurrying. The driver radioed that they'd better get a plow down the road; that we were struggling with all our chains on.
More silence. One rider turned to me and pointed out an empty garage with the doors open wide. "Avalanche zone," she said. "They have been hit so many times they just leave the doors open so it sweeps right through."
45 minutes later, in almost complete silence, in almost total whiteout the entire drive, we arrived at work.
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