The best of plans can go awry

This morning’s plan was to get up, go to work early, get in a good day of running the GC and the pilot plant, and then cruise on up to Keystone

The day started off well.. I got up, loaded the truck with the supplies for the weekend, and hot the road. A little behind schedule, but not so bad, until I hit the parking lot that was 270. Bumper to Bumper. 3 miles. 25 minutes. So much for getting in early. But work was good, unable to run the pilot plant because I ran out of catalyst, and we sepnt the morning getting some fresh catalyst. But the GC data was good, spent most of the data working up some new samples and calculating the results. Good stuff, stuff that I like. But the plans for the weekend took a shot when I heard that I70 was closed, both directions, from Vail to Floyd Hill, due to very high winds . So were the few alternate routes to get up there. And, CDOT was not speculating when the highways would re-open, but the high wind warnings were going to last until midnight. Ruh Roh..

As the day progressed, the news didn’t get any better. People were stranded, white out conditions, no sign of re-opening. .

At the end of the day, the roadways were still closed, I was going to have to wait until Saturday morning to drive up, hopefully the roads would be opened. At the end of my commute to Bens, they announced that they were re-opening the roadways. Time to go..

First off, driving in the snow is not my favorite activity, but the drive from Denver to Silver Plume was easy and fast. Highway speeds, just a lot of wind. Silver Plume to Bakerville was icy/snowpacked driving, but still not too much of a problem. Bakerville to the Eisenhower Tunnel..Different story. Ambiance was set by a bad crash on the eastbound side of the highway. Actually the crash was a car and a couple of SUVs heading east, but one of the SUVs had flipped and landed on the Westbound sign of the wall separating the lanes. Zoinks. From this point on, the road was very snowpacked, more than a few cars had spun out and were just parked along the highway. Big rigs were pulling over, even though they were chained, and then above Loveland, 100 meters short of the tunnel, there was a fender bender on the west bound side, and the trucks were unable (apparently) to move out of the lanes, so we were forced to weave around the crash and the cars/trucks that were stopped on the shoulders. My knuckles were hurting from lack of circulation. They’re still white, and that was 2.5 hours ago.. This was the only spot of the drive where my lil’ pick-up had difficulty with traction. I finished the last 50 meters of climbing almost sideways. The rest of the drive was relatively uneventful, and I finally made it to Keystone..

Time to unwind (it’s dumping outside right now,or at least the wind is blowing a lot of snow around)

saionara