Stuck in the snow in May…

It’s 84 degrees at my house today… our warmest day of the season so far. It was not, however, this warm in the mountains yesterday where we went for a Sunday afternoon drive!

We knew there was still a little snow, so it was fun to take pictures of the melting snow along the road…
…and the merry little mountain streams carrying the snow melt down to the river…
As the road switched-back through the mountains we could even see the snow back on the road behind us, which was now across the valley!
We hit a couple of spots further up the mountain where the snow was still across the road. No problem! Our truck has 4-wheel drive… so we just plowed right through it…

…until we came to a patch where we didn’t plow right through it! Instead we got stuck!

I opened my door and the snow was up to the running board…
The only thing we had to dig with was a small metal bowl the kids had brought along for the dog to drink out of. It was not very funny at the time… It took Lyle an hour of digging in wet snow, crawling around in the mud, jacking the truck up with a hand-cranked jack to put pieces of wood under the wheels, and a whole lot of frustration and grumbling, to get us “unstuck”!
After Lyle backed the truck out of the snow, he and the kids walked back up to where we were stuck to retrieve the jack and bowl…
Then Lyle, in his ultimate wisdom, decided that since there were tracks now, we could make it through if we’d just give it another go! I was skeptical… but, hey, I wasn’t the one who was cold, and wet, and muddy. If he wanted to risk it again, I was willing to let him!

Can you believe he did it? And he was right! We did make it through.

However, just around the next bend we ran into more, even deeper snow. Fortunately, he was wise enough to decide that no, we definitely wouldn’t make it through that section. And that explained why there hadn’t been any traffic on the road for the whole hour or so we had been sitting there!

So we turned around and went home the way we had come (back through the snow patch we had just dug out of, for the third time!), rather than completing the loop through the mountains that was our intended route.

It took close to 2 hours to get home, and Lyle fidgeted in his wet jeans all the way home. But his attitude was, “Hey, we always say life is an adventure, don’t we?”

And it wouldn’t have made nearly as good a story if we had been able to get out right away!