Snow Bound - Part 1

Although not a part of my current cross country adventures this was a fun day and I haven't had it on-line for a while and thought many of you would enjoy it...surprisingly I did too.

So what do you do when you get 16 inches of snow, 30 mph winds and there is a no travel advisory with closed interstates? You drive 35 miles to your friends house to do some snow shoeing of course!

The drive to Lakefield was a little adventurous but not too bad. Thankfully there weren't any other cars out so I could drive in either lane I wanted when the other was full of snow drifts. Obviously getting to Sarah's house was the hard part and the final 5 miles to Kilen woods state park on a paved county road would be a snap. Yeah right!

We had to bust through some smaller drifts at first but nothing too bad. We're tough, we can handle it. Then we hit a big drift covering the entire road but had just enough momentum to punch through that as well. Ha! We're not going to let a little bad weather keep us from having a good time.

Then we came to the top of a hill and saw a very big and very long snow drift. I hit the gas to try and power our way through but it was useless. The snow was way too deep and the bottom of the car was actually sliding on the snow like a sled. We managed to get through about 40 feet of the drift but were still 10-15 feet away from being out of it totally. We both looked at each other for a moment trying to figure out just how we were going to get out of this. Then we each grabbed a snow shoe for a shovel, forced our doors open past the snow blocking them shut and started digging.

Once we started digging down we realized just how bad it was. The tires were still sitting on about 5 or 6 inches of snow; which meant in order to get any traction the car would need to drop that far to get the tires on pavement (that means A LOT of snow had to be moved). We had to dig trenches along the sides of the car to work in and and then started digging all the snow out from underneath the car (which is not easy task at all). The wind was really howling and picked up even more while we were digging, blowing snow in our faces and drifting the snow back in where we'd just removed it.

After 1 1/2 hours of hard work we finally had the car dug out! Man, was that ever a good feelin!

We didn't have the guts to continue on to the park though, not knowing what the last couple miles of road were like. Especially considering it was getting later in the day and we didn't want to drive these roads in the dark. Since the North/South roads were better then the East/West roads (the park was to the east and town was to the west) we drove about 7 miles North to Windom and then back South to Lakefield in order to stay on larger, clearer roads. We certainly couldn't have turned around and went back the way we came.

After all that work we were still determined to do a little snow shoeing so we stopped by a tiny little county park for a quick hike. Although it was fun we were tired, it was very overcast, windy and it had turned quite a bit colder. It only took 15 or 20 minutes to hike around the park and I think we were both ready to quit.

Go to Part 2