Those of you who keep track of me (or of the podcast) may have noticed the loooong stretch of radio silence. Ninety percent of that is due to getting the book into the capable hands of Shannon Okey over at Cooperative Press. Then there were the holidays (and family I don’t get to see nearly enough of). And then there was the snow (should be accompanied in your head by da da da duuuummmmmm).

In Which Our Familee Decides to Go On a Jaunt

We thought it would be nifty to go up to Gila Hot Springs and Cliff Dwellings in the Southern New Mexican mountains for a little dip in the hot spring during the cool weather while staying at the delightful and funky Wilderness Lodge.

And it was!
Nifty, I mean.
Until suddenly it wasn’t.

You know how sometimes you get those gut instincts that you KNOW everyone will groan at and say, “No, you’re just being [fill in the blank]… Everything’s fine…”
Then later, when it all goes to hell in a handbasket, you try really hard to refrain from saying, “SEE! I told you!”… or worse, you think, “Dang… I really should have said something…”

Yeah, well, I really should have said something.

What Befell Our Familee on the Thirtiethe Day of Decemberr, year of Our Lord Two Thousande and Tenne

On the 29th—the day before we were to head back home—we saw the warnings of a storm heading in to blanket the entire southwest. Arizona was scheduled for a cold snap the likes of which daytime temps haven’t seen in quite some time. In NM we were up above 7,000 feet (I can’t recall exactly, might have been over 8K) so we knew we’d at least get something. The report was pretty clear that roads would be coated and would need to be plowed.

Now. There is only one road in and out of this lovely little place. It’s a tiny valley at the top of the mountain range. You’re only there if you WANT to be there (there are good reasons to go) and since it’s not a main thoroughfare, the plowing priority was bound to be low, right?

I heard and read all this and I thought to myself, “Self. You need to wake the kids and get the heck outta Dodge pronto. You have old tires, 2wd, an eight year old car, and your children and husband with you.” Then, in my head I heard Eddie Murphy from his Delirious album menacing, “GEeeeeeT OUuuuuuuT!”

But I didn’t let that impulse go any further than my own self. [insert wagging finger here]

In the morning (30 Dec 2010) we awoke to find a GLORIOUS winter landscape—I’d been up half the night and nothing was falling at 3am or so when I finally went to bed. Truly gorgeous way to wake up. The kids had a ball! We had a nice breakfast. We paused and dawdled thinking that SURELY the plow would be through soon.

Then… we just… um… decided to go for it and muscle through.
Now, I was scared to death and didn’t take any pictures until we turned so I am relying on the kindness of the interwebs here. Please do visit the sites I’m borrowing pics from. Many are from real photographers and they do a much better job of chronicling weather that looked like ours than I would have done taking snaps of the real thing. I’ve noted from where I got what and hope they enjoy getting traffic from some people who might not have found their blogs otherwise.

Okay.
That being said.

If we’d been driving THIS

from http://blog.leasetrader.com_archive_2009_06_10_Land-Rover-Defender-Fire-amp-Ice-editions.aspx

we would have been fine. But instead we were driving this

no, wait… this

Our Chariot

and hadn’t had the money for new tires before we left. This crossed our minds, but blood and stones, knowwhatImean? At least we’d gotten new front brakes.

So.

Mom’s driving her CRV with 4wd and I’m driving the Vue with 2wd (however—and this is important—FRONT 2-wheel drive) and we get maybe four miles up the mountain and Andrew and I already know we’re in trouble. I keep losing traction, the snow is slippery, and blowing, and the visibility is garbage, and I’m scared.

I was a baby…an infant. I had nothing to be scared of… that day.

We finally called it when it looked like this (please know that the next bend began a 40 ° incline)

Point of Return

Point of Return—side view (NB: windshield started clear of snow. This was less than 2–3 minutes of snowfall accumulation)

and My Man put on my red coat and ran up ahead to flag down my Mom. She (magically?) turned her car around and came down to meet us. My Bro-in-Law helped me turn the car around (getting covered in snow all the while) and helped me carefully aim the car at a down-slope tree. That way, if we DID slide off the edge of the cliff, we’d have a tree stop us… until the back end of the car fish-tailed and dragged us down the mountainside….not that I’m paranoid or anything. Well… more paranoid than the RV driver we passed coming UP as we went down.
He figures later. Don’t forget that he was driving the RV up IN A BLIZZARD… without chains.

In Whiche We Stay Anothere Night

Well, we slowly made it back to the Wilderness Lodge and had a pretty good chance of securing a room for the night (the group of 27 due in were on the other side of the storm and didn’t appear to be able to get in—chorus of “duh” anyone?).

We collected a few more stragglers during the day (stranded couple of engineers, six campers who were in Crocs Without Socks) and had a curious night of Twister, Puzzles, and Trivial Pursuit.

The morning of the 31st broke bright and promising. The Engineers made it out (in their 4wd sedan thing) so we were pretty excited. It took a bit, but we finally got our act together, having heard that all but the last two miles into town had been plowed that night. Why, you ask, was the road plowed except those last two miles? Because that’s the point at which the RV had gotten stuck. They pulled him out, turned around, and went back.

Lovely.

Our intrepid host had found chains in his back room, so we were set.

But the chains didn’t fit.
And the weather was clouding up again.
And the mountain was disappearing.

We decided to give it a test run before committing to the drive with mom… and couldn’t turn around without spinning the wheels (and making the worst rubber/engine smells EVER). So the husband and I cashed it in. We convinced Mom to go as it was definitely snowing again and her window of opportunity was ebbing away again. We had a rather drifty, surreal noontime. Our wonderful host went up to the general store and tried to divine new chains for us, messed around with wiring the small ones to our tires, then heard a plow!

Andrew ran up to the road (it’s about a mile to do that) and lo and behold, the road HAD indeed been plowed. The Husband scoped out the best way to get up the last sharp incline of the rutted dirt road that would get us out of our digs and onto the main drag, and… we were off!

Those first two miles were glorious and looked like this:

https://lindamphotos.wordpress.com

See how there’s patches of road showing through the ice?

Well, it started with more road than ice, then gradually became the above (more ice than snow) then it was suddenly this.

http://www.pashnit.com/forum/

Okay, maybe not quite that severe… it was more gradual. And seductive.

We’d passed the turn-around-tree from the day before (I actually teared up seeing that we’d made it that far) and rounded the bend… and suddenly all the patches of road were gone. 100% ice.

But we had to keep moving to keep whatever traction we’d managed to get. It was 16 degrees and snowing again, though the wind wasn’t as bad as the day before. Heading up wasn’t nearly as bad as heading down.

http://www.nps.gov/glac/parknews/

http://www.hickerphoto.com/ice-road-6970-pictures.htm

Add about 20-30% more steepness to the pics above.

First gear.

5–8mph.

We took over an hour and a half to go 12 miles. Can I just tell you—my whole body ached for days after this. Like I’d run a marathon. Srously. I was panting and shaking. The boys were SILENT in the back seat and while the older is Oblivious Boy, the younger is not. He white knuckled it with us.

The other real evil part of this that I can’t get a pic of is that the plow—which had plowed off the top layer of snow and let the ice form on the road beneath—Did Not Drop Any Gravel! The bastages should be taken out and horsewhipped. Really? Seriously? No salt? Okay, environmental impact. I get it. But no gravel? WTH? Are you trying to tell me there’s an effing DIRT shortage in New Mexico? Oh there was SOME gravel. Maybe a stitch every mile or so. Why? Because that’s where they dropped some to help stranded cars out. I have a news bulletin for the New Mexican Snow Plow folks—you wouldn’t have to spend the time, money, or effort getting people out of the snow if you graveled when you plowed in the first place!*

So.

Did I mention we’d left at three pm?

http://rafalandronowski.wordpress.com/

By the time we got off the 15 and made the turn onto the relatively safer (relative is a useful term here) route 35 the day was looking more like night. It was still snowing and definitely darker.

The roads on 35 looked more like this, though.

http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/boone/09icestormpicts.shtml

Okay, well, not the fallen branches, but the trees heavy with snow thing, definitely.

A few miles (or a few hours?) down 35—still creeping along, mind you, as it’s still slippery—we met the 27 who were on their way TO the Wilderness Lodge. I really hope we didn’t seem too encouraging. They were parked walking distance from a different lodge (on a lake) and of their six cars only two had 4wd. Now, recall, it was getting dark, it was 16 degrees, it was snowing and getting windier, and we’d spent most of our time coming UP and over, they’d be spending most of their time going over and DOWN.

In cars unequipped for such shenanigans.

So we managed to stop (I figured with 27 of them, someone could help us with a push if we needed it…plus where they were was flat) and rolled down the window to ask if the were—indeed—the 27. Oh yes, they were. One husband said, “My wife doesn’t want to go any further but I’m willing to try it.”

I can’t really recall (adrenaline rush, anyone) what I actually said but it might have been something like, “ARE YOU EFFING OUT OF YOUR FREAKIN MIND?!!” Or, well, it may have been more along the lines of (weak smile), “really? Wow, um. That would be. Jeez. I don’t know. It’s really. You know. Icy [gulp] and getting dark…”

We learned later that the 2wd cars did NOT attempt it. We asked them to let the Lodge know we’d gotten as far as the lake and we pushed on.

Gradually over the next hour it eased up. The ice turned to snow (not always a better thing) and the car felt more in control, though the ice on the windshield wipers was not fun. Poor Andrew got out and had to take minutes in the 16 ° to chip off ice… using a Starbuck’s gum tin (multitasker!) as it’s been ages since we had an ice scraper. We got cell service back—oh, did I forget to mention, there was no cell service. If we’d gone off the cliff they wouldn’t have found us until March. We called my Mom. She called the Lodge to let them know we were okay. And eventually we made it to Deming and had a (remarkably mediocre) Chinese dinner for New Year’s Eve.

We had a lot to celebrate though, and I was up for staying in Lordsburg, NM (just down the road a-piece from Deming) just to have some downtime, watch the ball drop on TV, and maybe get a Very Big Drink. But all the folks stuck on the southern side of the storm were holed up there already and there were no rooms left in the (Days) Inn. We soldiered on, singing showtunes and imbibing caffiene (both candy and liquid). We made it home at 11:30 and tossed the boys in bed. Then we collapsed.

In Which We Reflecte on What We Hath Learnede

Here are the lessons I take away with me:

1. Mother Nature can kick your butt—I need to stop pretending otherwise.
2. Dry, crunchy snow on ice may actually be a nifty traction-saving invention (honestly, I think that’s how we made it out).
3. *Never, ever, drive in effing New Mexico*
4. If you’re ever in an emergency, stick with me. I’ve survived: all major CA earthquakes since 1967, the LA riots, rip tides, a car crash in a Pinto, and 9/11… Some may think this is a sign to stay far away from me. Possibly. But so far, I’ve walked away… Just sayin’.

And family. That’s the biggie. I love my family. And, being the great parents we are, what did we say to the boys when we were safely on a road without ice?

“Don’t you EVER do ANYthing like that EVER in your life. Call your parents. We’ll send money. Nothing is ever important enough to make you attempt that.”

Ah.

Great way to start 2011.

*Why am I so down on NM? Back in 2006 I wrote this blog post. I have a history with the state and driving. This trip did nothing to improve my bias.