Let It Snow

1999 Dodge Dakota

I've been having great fun driving around in the snow for the last week or so in my four-wheel-drive pickup truck with the extra fat tires. (The picture is not my 1999 Dodge Dakota, but one just like it, down to the paint and the badges. But no dent.) Most use I have gotten out of the four-wheel-drive since I bought the truck nine years ago. Well, it's fun when there aren't any other cars on the road, but once you get close to a shopping center traffic starts getting congested and then it's just like any normal day of creeping along from one very slow traffic light to another.

This snowstorm is the worst we have seen since we moved here in 1990. We have had as much snow during the course of a winter, but not all at once. The Oregonian (our local paper) had an interesting graph [removed dead link], too large to fit in this blog.

We get so little snow here we aren't really equipped to handle it. I think the only roads that have been getting plowed are the highways. None of the roads I drove on today had been plowed. The snow is getting hammered by traffic and some of the intersections are really rough. Imagine driving across an intersection covered with eight inch deep potholes. This slows down traffic even more.

Manholes are their kind of special hazard. I saw numerous ones that were bare of snow, but with a ring of ice piled up around them, kind of like a miniature volcano. Driving over one will give you a real jolt. The trick is to spot them ahead of time and then straddle them with your wheels, if the traffic will allow it.

I am really surprised at how well my tires grip the snow. Technically they are bald. They are worn down to the wear bars. They have mud and snow tread, and there is still about a quarter inch of tread left. Evidently that is enough. There are ruts worn in the snow a few inches deep. Some places they can trap you. A couple of times today I turned the wheel to change lanes and the truck just kept plowing straight ahead. Letting the truck slow down and then goosing the gas would get me out of the rut.

We get so little snow here most people don't know how to handle driving in it. There were a fair number of nervous nellies out driving around today. These are the ones with chains on their tires crawling along at ten or fifteen miles per hour. They definitely contribute to the congestion, but then they are not likely to have an accident, which would really tie up traffic.

We came across one small car sitting crosswise, half off the road on NE 25th. Two guys got out and pushed it back onto the road, got back in and resumed going down the road. The driver (female, if that makes any difference) was trying to stay out of the ruts. I suspect her car may have had some protrusions on the underside that they were dragging on the snow when the wheels were in the ruts. We hadn't gotten much farther down the road when all of sudden she got sideways again. I was really surprised as I had seen nothing that would indicate any kind of problem. She stopped and got straightened out again but now she is going ten miles an hour, so I pass her.

I have gotten by without chains, but then the biggest hills I have had to deal with are the highway on- and off-ramps. My friend Jack lives in the middle of a bunch of hills and he is using chains on his four-wheel-drive Suburban. He tried using them on the rear wheels, but found his front end was sliding sideways when he braked. So he moved them to the front wheels and that works much better. I have seen this on few other four-wheel-drive vehicles as well.

I used to go skiing at Mt. Hood and had studded tires for the front of my front-wheel-drive car. At some point there was a nasty traffic accident involving a front-wheel-drive van that had studded tires only on the front. This led to a lawsuit and now Les Schwab Tires will only mount studded tires on all four wheels on front-wheel-drive vehicles. So having chains only on the front wheels could lead to having the rear end slide around and colliding with something. Having chains on your tires restricts your speed so maybe the risk is not as great as with studded tires.

Tire Shop Sued In Fatal Crash
Seattle Times Staff: Seattle Times News Services
Friday, December 19, 1997

McMINNVILLE, Ore. - The family of two women killed when a 1993 van equipped with two studded tires spun out of control into the path of their car is suing Les Schwab for $1.3 million.

The lawsuit claims the chain of tire shops improperly sold and installed just two studded tires, instead of a full set of four, on the car owned by Robert and Marsha Worlock of Newberg.

Copyright (c) 1997 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.

The lawsuit was settled a couple of years later, probably for an undisclosed amount. High Beam Research has an article about it, but they want you to sign up for their service, and I'm not that curious.

Update December 2016 removed dead links, fixed broken html.