Life in Wyoming - Windy Winter Drives

Not long after the fluffy white flakes fall to the ground, the wind starts. Soon, all the moisture has been blown out of the flakes and all that’s left are small pellets of ice. With no moisture to hold them down, one soon starts to experience “blowing snow”. It moves across the roads like a fog or mist, only fast and eerie.


This is so difficult to describe… Tom says “it looks like the concrete is boiling” because it resembles steam. It’s shifting and moving, and wild!

While driving with the wind head-on or coming from a side, the moving ice particles are tolerable, but when I’m driving with a tail-wind, I have trouble keeping my bearings about me. It’s just plain weird to have this sheet of shifting while stuff coming out from under your vehicle, and it’s moving faster than you too.

On the way home last week, I was driving from lane to lane to avoid the snow-drifts building up in the road. At one major intersection, when I turned, I nearly got stuck and actually fish-tailed a little driving through the drift.

It’s weird though. The drifts build on one side of the road and not the other. We’ve noticed, when driving through neighborhoods, that one side of the street will have about six inches in their front yard, while the other side of the street has two feet!

I saw a boulder last week with snow two feet high around it, but RIGHT NEXT to it, you could see the bare ground. There was like a nine-inch channel that the wind was whipping around in.

The micro-climates are intriguing, to say the least.