It was about 12:40 this afternoon when I drove down the embankment off of Highway 36 at the Broadway exit, scrambling to get to off a completely gridlocked freeway and on to the frontage road alongside the highway so I could take my chances getting home via surface streets.I followed a pickup truck, drawing courage from his successful navigation down a short bumpy hill and off the freeway, and by the time I left Broadway and turned on to 70th Ave I was feeling pretty unstoppable. Of course, it took another hour and 15 minutes to get home from there, but I had successfully freed myself from the snowy, gridlocked prison known this afternoon as the Boulder Turnpike.
What a day!
What a day!
I had a closing scheduled for 4 p.m. this afternoon downtown, but with the bad weather blowing in and predictions calling for it to get worse during the day, I started things off this morning by coordinating an earlier closing and we all agreed to meet downtown at 10:30 a.m.
By 9 a.m. it was coming down in blankets in Arvada, but we were already committed and our closer was travelling up from Highlands Ranch to meet us halfway. In real estate, a closing is like a wedding, and there are so many moving pieces that must be aligned perfectly that cancelling or postponing is not an option we like to exercise.
By the time we finished signing our papers and completing the transaction, it was 11:30 and the snow was intensifying in Denver. By noon I was on I-25 and the snow was blowing horizontally, straight out of the north. I fiddled with the radio dial, without luck, trying to find a traffic report.
My Honda Pilot shook as gusts of wind blasted by, my frozen windshield wipers pushing smudge back and forth across my line of vision. I tried to lower the driver-side window to clean the windshield with my towel, but the window was frozen shut. The next time we came to a standstill, I got out of the car and did a rapid fire scrub on the windshield, which only helped a little.
Interstate 70 was completely shut down because of a 15 car pileup at Sheridan, so I continued north on I-25. The Boulder Turnpike had been the scene of a terrible pileup earlier in the day, but it was open now and so I figured I could take it for a little ways and then get off if things got bad. As soon as I exited I-25, the Turnpike came to a frozen stop. Thirty minutes and about 200 yards later, I made my run down the embankment.
Note to self for future blizzards: do not get on the Boulder Turnpike during a whiteout!
I made it home around 2 p.m. It took a little over two hours to go 17 miles, and I considered myself lucky.
I know there were thousands of others out there today who were suffering with me in the Blizzard of 2009. It was not fun.
But when the skies clear out and the spring sunshine returns tomorrow, we'll have one more two or three-day winter wonderland, giving my kids a final (?) chance to sled, slide and make snow angels in the backyard.
That's Colorado. Whether you love it or hate it, you always have to be ready for it!
