Most of the snow fell yesterday afternoon and evening. Yesterday it started raining around noon, and continued until 2:30 or 3:00, when it turned into a heavy snow. Between 3:00 and 5:00 (when I left the office), we got roughly 4 inches. As you can probably guess, that means that most of the commuters got caught in the worst of it. By the time I left, traffic was backed up all the way into Boulder. It was stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper, for about 2 miles. Those 2 miles took 2 hours! What I finally discovered is that about 20 cars and 4 or 5 semis had gotten themselves stuck in the snow, strewn about over probably a half-mile of the highway. I spent the next hour literally weaving my way through all the stuck cars, with several close fits. There were a few police cars around helping guide traffic and push the stuck cars. Several times I had to stop for 5 or 10 minutes while they got a stuck car moving again in front of me. I finally got passed the minefield and got up to 20 MPH. It's good thing, too, because there are several big hills between here and Boulder. Without the extra speed, I might not have made it up some of them. I did almost got stuck on the biggest hill. I somehow got out of the track of the cars in front of me and almost didn't make it back. As I got into Broomfield, I got of the freeway several exits early to avoid the last two hills and took the longer, flatter, way around. All told, my drive home yesterday took almost 4 hours.
To top it all off, tomorrow and Friday it's supposed to be sunny and get into the 50's. Welcome to Colorado!
