Tales of I-80

About half an hour outside Laramie it starts to snow, hard. Soon we're in a white-out with a semi-truck about two inches from our rear bumper and another maybe a foot in front of us. But who can tell? We can’t see a thing. Nada. We are surely about to be crushed alive between two semis from hell.

The road wasn’t packed with snow. Visibility was the issue. When a semi-truck passes, it twists a nasty tornado of snow around you, erasing every possible marker available. You have to trust your instincts. But I wasn’t driving. I was panicked, as were all the passengers. We were in a mess of swirling, blinding snow — to the point that it no longer made sense to move forward at all, according to my girlfriend at the wheel.

Then I noticed the traffic heading east towards Cheyenne was a lot heavier than the traffic going west. I shrugged it off. But I did note tiny crystals floating past my car. Then, in a short period of time, probably less than a minute, a blinding cloud of flakes assaulted my windshield. Where the hell did this come from? I fretted. The wind turbines vanished from sight. I had, in fact, about 50 feet of visibility. I turned on my lights. Snow swirled crazily around my beams like a rising mayfly hatch.