Folks, we’re rapidly approaching winter, and with that comes winter weather — snow, ice, low visibility, all those factors that make driving in December so fun. But how bad can things really get, and is winter really the worst of it? Earlier this week, I asked you for the worst conditions you’ve ever driven through, and you gave some truly good stories in response. Here are some of the best.
I’m going to add a Southern Special.
Black Ice.
A road looks like an open English Muffin. There are “nooks and crannies” in the road. If water gets in these nooks and crannies and doesn’t cover the surface, that’s black ice. If it does cover the surface, it’s glare ice.
During the day, black ice looks like a damp road.
While Glare ice’s deeper level is much more obviously a problem.
Black ice is dangerous as hell for one major reason.
It looks perfectly safe.
90% of the time, you run into black ice at night. The higher points in the pavement hide the ice’s reflection from your headlights so the pavement looks 100% dry. It only becomes visible when an oncoming car’s headlights reflect towards you and the pavement looks wet.
To make matters worse, it has a lot more traction than glare ice. This sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t. The road looks dry and feels dry up to a certain speed because the tires have traction on the dry high points of the pavement. But try to go faster or do something that makes the tires heat up and release that hidden ice and bad things happen instantly.
I’ve driven in some nasty stuff. Fog in particular is really scary. But nothing gets the seat cushion to crawl up my rear quicker than driving down a road on dry pavement going 45 mph and suddenly see the lights of an oncoming car reflect off the pavement and realize I’m on ice.
If you think the air freshener is bad, wait until you see the actual real-life winter phenomenon. I’ve personally slipped on black ice as a child, so I can confirm it’s not just a southern thing. It’s coming for you, wherever you are.
i rode my motorcycle through sleet and freezing rain and it was the worst damn travel day ive ever had. i was sticking my hands directly on the heads to warm them up, only had a half helmet at the time so i was getting microdermabrasion as i drove. had to make sure i was perpendicular to the road at all times. but at the time i only had a motorcycle, no car, and i had no pto so i couldnt take the day off. it had to be done. a friend of mine saw me going into work and he said i looked like i wanted to die.
As of last week, I have now apparently ridden a motorcycle through hail. Lemme tell you — rain is fine, solid matter falling from the sky is worse. At least I had three wheels to work with.
I’ve been in some terrible driving conditions, but a personal highlight is anything with heavy, dry snow over pure ice, with enough blowing wind that you can’t see the road.
I’ve had it happen more than a few times, but have also gotten lucky in that it’s always been on a low traffic two lane road rather than a highway. Crawling my way back home at 5-10MPH by essentially treating the shoulder like a braille guardrail and crossing my fingers that I don’t end up stuck halfway up onto a fresh drift.
Certain seasonal night time rainy conditions can really suck, too. Cloudy enough to obscure the moon, late fall so there’s hardly any foliage and with the chunky, sleety rain you can find that really clogs up your forward vision with seemingly infinite headlight reflections. Booooo, that.
Honestly the conditions themselves are hardly ever my top concern, it’s worrying about other drivers. I know my vehicles well enough to get them through pretty much anything (eventually), but all it takes is one other person who is not paying attention, momentarily losing traction/control or otherwise failing to react to a hazard to really crank the risk factor. Random acts of wildlife, too. Moose strikes are serious business, and all it takes is one particularly leisurely blink of an eye to find yourself becoming one with nature.
Crap weather happens. Don’t go out of your way to avoid it, but absolutely respect it.
Winter weather is like onions, or ogres. It’s got layers.
Probably when I was fresh out of college, living in Virginia, and had my first in-person interview for the only job offer I had received scheduled for Monday morning 650 miles away in Chicago. I rented a Ford Taurus on Saturday evening with a plan to leave early Sunday morning. It was snowing that night and it wasn’t until I pulled over and looked at the tires that I realized the reason why the car was a nightmare in the snow was that the right front tire was, quite literally, bald. Enterprise was already closed, so I started the whole trip off by jacking the front right corner up with the OEM jack, taking the wheel off, fitting the donut spare, jacking the rear right off, swapping the bald tire to that position, then jacking the right front up again and putting the tire with tread on that corner.
I then proceeded to do a 650 mile drive in a FWD Taurus with 1 bald tire and 3 shitty all-seasons in various condition... in a full-on blizzard. And I mean a nobody-on-any-of-the-major-highways blizzard. The kind of blizzard that was so bad that the people who I had the interview scheduled with proactively called ME without my even saying anything, to suggest a virtual job interview instead. But I declined and insisted I’d be there. Most of the drive was spent just trying to see where the road went. Some of it was spent trying to eek out enough traction to make it up hills without the front end washing off to the side due to the crown in the road. And some was spent closer to Chicago where the storm wasn’t quite as visible bad, but instead had turned the roads into a solid sheet of black ice - and I do mean the entire highway was a solid ice rink for dozens of miles.
Made for some cool photos with my cell phone though. And the interview went well enough that I’ve been living in Chicago for almost a decade now, so I suppose it was worth it, even if it wound up being something like a 14 hour drive :)
That was a major highway that was so deserted that the entire time I was stopped (in one of the lanes of travel) to take a few quick photos I don’t think I ever saw another vehicle.
This was when the storm got so bad that the highway was closed, and I was forced onto a side road that had about a foot of unplowed snow that I’m not sure I’d have made it through if I hadn’t been lucky enough to wind up immediately behind a plow.
And lastly I’ll point out that my daily driver at the time was a Subaru Outback with 250k miles (hence my renting a more reliable vehicle for the drive) on dedicated winter tires, so I was more that familiar with going out in every major snow storm and dicking around no matter how deep the snow... but a FWD rental car on ultra-shitty tires is not at ALL as much fun, lol.
Click through to the original comment for more photos. I’m pretty sure I, in my little FR-S, would’ve been stuck. The bike might make it through, though.
Years ago I was riding home from a Triumph motorcycle rally in Western Canada and was taking a secondary road that was far from everything but usually much prettier than the main highway.
It started with rain, which was no big deal, even when it was coming down hard enough to be starting to sheet on the road. It’s a big, heavy bike and I’ve been riding for decades so I’m used to pushing through that. But then it turned into hail, which feels like getting peppered by shots from bb guns at highway speed.
At the point that the hail got big enough that I was starting to genuinely worry about damage (to us and the bike), we caught up to a station wagon pulling a sailboat. It was a fixed-keel boat, so it sat about 7-8 feet up on its trailer. They weren’t going very fast, so taking the risk, I tucked up close to the rear of the boat to get into its shadow from the hail. I signaled to the driver that I was looking for cover and got a thumbs up back, and we stayed like that for 10-15 minutes until we were passing an isolated hunting lodge with the lights on.
I flashed the driver and gave him a thank-you wave, then made for the lodge. As we pulled up, someone came out on the covered patio and quickly waved my wife inside to warm up and directed me to tuck the bike into a small garage with the other vehicles where it could be protected. They gave us some hot coffee and then walked us through what to listen for and what to do in case of a tornado (a red alert had just been issued).
Thankfully, the storm passed about 30 minutes later, and then we had to wait another hour or so for the plows to get by to clear about half a foot of hail from the roads before we could head out.
Maybe 15 minutes past the lodge, we saw the boat, along with emergency vehicles including a crane, which was just starting to lift off the 18 wheeler that had blown over onto the car and flattened it completely.
Police waved us by, so (thankfully) I didn’t get much of a look at it, but I don’t see any way anyone in the car could have survived, nor would we if we’d still been tucked behind the boat.
I don’t take that road any more.
This is why I live in fear of sitting next to tractor trailers on the highway. Truckers will tell you that complaints about semi visibility are largely overblown, and that they can see you fine when you’re alongside, but 18-wheelers are still huge. Anything could happen.
I think I’ve relayed the story once before…. In the early 00’s, I got together with some friends for Halo multiplayer. There was snow in the forecast, but nothing serious.
While we were blissfully playing games, Mother Nature turned the snow up to 11 and let us have it. “Snow” had been upgraded to “Snow event”, and all the people who actually watched the news knew to stay the hell off the roads. To this day, I’ve never seen that much snow fall that quickly. It was somewhere past 10cm an hour…the kind of snow that’s commonplace in the Rockies, but not in Southern Ontario.
My drive home was normally about 20 minutes through back roads between two small cities. It took me just over two hours. It was surreal. Plows weren’t out at all, or if they were, I couldn’t tell. There were no other cars on the road - so no tire ruts to follow. There was just a blanket of smooth white snow everywhere. The snow that was falling was heavy, and I had to stop frequently to unclog my wipers. I had a Pathfinder at the time, but that didn’t help me when I faced my biggest challenge. For the first part of my drive, street lights cast a shadow on a tiny bump that was a roadside curb. That was how I knew where the road was. Then the street lights stopped. And shortly after, there was no curb either. Just heavy falling snow, a smooth blanket of snow out in front of me, and the knowledge that somewhere directly in front of me, the road curved to the left. I had to turn around and try another way…which was stressful in its own way. A three point turn on a country road where the ditches are mostly invisible isn’t fun. The snow and wind had already covered my tracks, so there was nothing to follow going back but the curb again. I eventually white-knuckled it home thanks to another route where the bends had guardrails, and farms were closer to the road.
It’s hard enough to pry me away from a good LAN party when the weather isn’t terrible. I think I would’ve just stayed until things cleared up. Maybe get taped to the ceiling like that one picture. You know the one.
Hard to pick one, complete white out blizzards, dense fog, tropical storms, so many bad weather drives. The absolute worst was probably a snow to ice event, was already on the road headed home when it started to go slick, due to where live there is little road prep or snow removal so what was turned to slush early turned to ice and it just layered up. It took over 8 hours to get home and went past hundreds of abandoned cars in the ditch or on the shoulder, eventually made it home and was the only person home on street for 2 days. It looked like the scene in the Walking Dead the next day where there were thousands of cars sitting abandoned on the highway.
Snow itself isn’t that bad to drive through, provided you aren’t dealing with feet of it. Snow that’s melted and resolidified to a solid sheet of ice across the road is worse.
Probably not the worst winter weather most Midwesterners have endured, but the first time driving through a blizzard in Minnesota as a lifelong Texan almost made me cry.
The first winter I was there I had to cover working at a different office (in St. Cloud) than the one I usually work at (Minneapolis), so that meant a 60 mile drive up and back in one day. There was snow in the forecast but it said “light” so I didn’t think much of it, as there was no snow on the morning drive up. The drive back was a different story, as it had started snowing HARD an hour before I left work.
I specifically remember driving down US-10 in my RWD IS350 with my hazards on at like 15-20mph for more than an hour in near whiteout conditions. What made it worse was the snow had occurred so early in the year that I hadn’t even bothered to change my car to winter tires (I didn’t know any better at the time). My butthole was clenched the entire drive, and twice I spun 180 degrees so badly that I stopped traffic just trying to recover. One spin-out was on a sloped portion of the highway near Elk River, and I remember a very helpful sheriff stopped right behind me and let me reverse up the slope to make sure I didn’t slip off into the gulley.
Thankfully my boss was very understanding and got me a hotel for the night in Elk River. I learned my lesson and got snow tires immediately, and inadvertently also bought my first winter beater project car that I still own to this day (a 2004 Lancer Sportback).
My souvenir from that night are just the frozen ice cube pictures of my car:
Ah, you made the classic RWD winter driving mistake: Slowing down. The trick is to speed up and use the throttle to steer your rear end through corners, but only after putting a Eurobeat playlist on your stereo. Doesn’t work without that.
Getting ready to go snowboarding in the Upper Peninsula. Lake Effect was predicted and delivered. Snow was like sand that day. Main lift broke down so we had to skijor to another lift. Just another day in the BMW 5 Series Wagon with Blizzaks that did not want to idle after I started it. Finally drove it a couple miles to a gas station and shut it off and started it again and everything was fine.
Skijoring, apparently, is when you’re on skis (or, seemingly, snowboards) and you get pulled around by a vehicle or horse. This is a much more concise term than the one I grew up using, which was “winter wakeboarding.” You do lose out on the fun alliteration, though.
Worst weather I ever drove through was January 6th, 1995. I got out of the Navy in Mayport Fl on the 5th, drove to Atlanta to stay with a friend for the night, and was going to drive to NYC on the 6th.
I woke up to frost on my windows and had to scrape them with a cassette case, then was on the road by 8am. I was making great time, absolutely flying, to the point that it was early afternoon when I hit the DC suburbs. I was going to make it through DC by 3pm, and probably make it to NYC by 7pm, everything was going great!
Then the rain started. And the temperature dropped. And suddenly it was 31° F and the rain was both Biblical and freezing on the road. I could do about 33mph and be OK, but as soon as I hit 35mph, hydroplaning and complete loss of steering. But it was raining so hard that you really couldn’t see anyway.
So I was going 30mph, with my flashers on, along with the other cars who hadn’t pulled off. Which I expected to last for a couple miles, maybe 30 minutes. But in reality was the entire 9 hours it took from Washington DC to NYC. The only time that I could actually relax was going through the Lincoln Tunnel, because it FINALLY STOPPED RAINING FOR 4 MINUTES!
Did you try 34 miles per hour? You said 33 was fine but 35 was a horror, so I feel like you need to play with that middle ground a little.
One that sticks out in my mind was when I occasionally had to travel I-75 between Naples and Miami for work, aka Alligator Alley or “The Alley.” Long, flat, and boring, but it cut right through the Everglades and the shallow, warm water there could fuel some crazy thunderstorms.
There was one storm I had to drive through one time that actually made me nervous. Rain and clouds were so thick, it was incredibly dark for being daytime and the visibility was reduced so much I slowed down to 30-35 mph on a road where you’re normally doing 70-80 because it would not be safe to go any faster. I couldn’t even see any cars around me, either in front or behind, or in the opposing lanes on the other side of the road. For that time I was alone (and praying some idiot who thinks they’re invincible wouldn’t plow into the back of my car). Though eventually I made it out the other side, but it was one crazy storm.
Also, there was another time I was coming back from Miami and coming up on the tollbooth where lightning had just ignited a wildfire just off to the side of the structure on the southbound side. Then it got hit by lightning again as I drove past. That was fun.
I-75 may get the name, but everyone knows the real gator encounters happen on Tamiami Trail.
A friend and I drove from Colorado to Kanas City for a bike race. While changing in the car before the race I watched the wind whip up and the parking lot flash freeze, which was kinda cool because I’d never seen that before, but a bit foreboding because poop was getting real. The race went poorly (pretty standard), and the drive back was...ahem...memorable. West across Kansas with a 60mph cross wind, and during winter so all of the wheat fields had been harvested, leaving us with dustbowl conditions. Headlights necessary during the day because of visibility through the dirt. We watched the truck directly in front of us disappear going into and out of the clouds of dust. We kept following the truck because we couldn’t see anything else, but decided to back off when we started seeing the trailer tip, windward tires lifting off the road. When the precipitation started things got worse because the wind was lifting the wipers off the windshield, but once we hit the Colorado line, like in a movie, the wind stopped and the clouds parted gifting us with a glorious sunset.
Are you all trying to give me a phobia of semis? Is that the goal here? Well, it’s not going to work. I still want to get a class A CDL, for the bit. I’m already licensed for cars, motorcycles, boats, and personal watercraft, so 18-wheelers just seem like the next logical step. Or planes.
Driving to Omaha for the College World Series in 1996. I took the night shift since I’m a night owl. Around 2AM in the middle of Kansas, a rain storm comes through and cranks visibility down to about 15'. I decide to push through basically driving between idle and ~10 mph. At one point I see nothing but grass in front of me because there was a slight curve that I couldn’t see. I come to a complete stop, make a hard right, and keep going. I had to drive like that for about 30-45 minutes.
Being from LA (not L.A.), I’ve driven in a few hurricanes but nothing was quite like this and never at night. The worst part was one friend (the kind of guy who’s usually not scared of anything or anyone) in the backseat absolutely freaking out the whole time because “there’s absolutely nothing in this state, no trees, nothing to break up the wind, a tornado could be coming at us and we wouldn’t know it. And these assholes make you pay a toll driving through this place. Oh shit, did you just hear something that sounds like a train?!?!?”
Consider that sports should, instead, not make you travel overnight. Or such long distances. Or shorter, but still frustrating distances. What I’m saying is I don’t like taking the train all the way to Queens to get to Citi Field.
Americans have no idea what a snowstorm actually is. Having grown up in Toronto, I recall many Blizzards / snowstorms in general, through which I would either walk, take the bus or drive to school. The worst was when I was only 18 years old and had just bought my first RWD car, a 2000 BMW 328i. Had All-seasons on because I refused to ruin the handling and ride quality of my precious E46, and couldn’t afford to get a second set of wheels / tires. Driving to school about an hour away (one-way) in the type of conditions the news described a few weeks later, I was grateful for making it alive through all of it, and somewhat impressed with myself and the Bimmer. Below text from CBC’s (local Canadian news) description of what I had just driven through in my BMW:
“Canadians shovelling out from the major snowfall that blanketed Central and Eastern Canada on Dec. 16-17, 2007, had reason to be awed by the storm’s fury.
About 30 to 40 centimetres fell on southern Ontario and Quebec before the system blasted into the Maritimes. Winds gusted up to 100 kilometres an hour in some places and the city of Ottawa set a single-day snowfall record with 35.7 cm.
Weeks later, a series of storms pounded southern Ontario with a nasty mix of snow, high winds, ice pellets and freezing rain on Feb. 1 and Feb. 5-6, 2008”
My friend, I want you to know that we have entire states that are further north than Toronto. We’ve got cities right on the other side of Lake Ontario, home to their own lake effect snow that I have personally lived in and driven through. I will say, though, folks in Toronto seem to be better about using snow tires than any other city I’ve been to. Y’all have that on us.
Whenever we get big rains during winter in the south and then the temps drop a bunch overnight. Rains all day and then turns the road into a sheet of ice at night. The next morning, the roadways (especially Dallas it seems) become a Mad Max (ice) Fury Road. There are always major pile ups, so you never know when someone around you will just go plowing into a group of cars. It’s always a matter of when and not if after those perfect conditions come through.
Y’know, the way you’re describing this, it sounds like an event that happens with some regularity. Do people not gain experience each time it happens, so that they’re better prepared the next time around?