Did anyone else head out of town yesterday and get stuck in weather? We left town at 1:30pm to beat the traffic and maybe make it out of Lower Mainland. It didn't look good, as on Friday morning ALL four highways between Lower Mainland and rest of Canada were closed due to heavy snowfall. So effectively, Lower Mainland was cut from rest of Canada for hours.
Weather in Vancouver was pouring rain, but we managed to beat the rush hour and made it easily out of town. Approaching Hope we could see the huge snowfall people had been reporting and I have never seen such a snow dump in Hope!
Approaching Hope we already knew that Fraser Canyon was closed due to avalanche risk. Highway 3 had been closed all morning, but had opened, however it was backed up with semis. Coquihalla had been closed from Thursday night, but reopened at noon, so we chose to try crossing it it. Big mistake. As quickly as we got on Coquihalla, traffic was already crawling with everyone trying to make it out before the nightfall. There were hundreds of semis taking the whole right lane and some were jumping the queue on left lane.
Traffic was slow but moving, however some 5 kilometers before the Great Bear Snowshed and the summit everything stopped for almost an hour. Finally a police car and a ambulance showed up and after almost two hours the traffic started moving again at walking speed. It seemed that whatever accident had happened was cleared and we managed to crawl 2 kilometers in the next hour.
As we were approaching the last chain up area, traffic stopped again and wasn't going to move again. While it was raining in Hope, near the Coquihalla summit it was snowing heavily. Snow started piling up on the highway which was almost pure ice. Truckers started installing their snow chains as we were waiting for something to happen. We waited and waited and darkness fell. Finally, after some 2 hours (!!) heavy rescue passed us on their way to the accident site, which likely was very close to the snowshed and perhaps 2 kilometers ahead of us. Based on what we heard, five semis had crashed together soon after the first accident was cleared, blocking the highway. The only information given to us was that it might take all night to clear the wreckage.
It was 10pm and we had already spent
7 hours stuck on Coquihalla when a small gap between the lanes was opened and some small cars like ours could barely make it to the u-turn place up ahead. We had prepared for slow traffic on Coquihalla with some snacks, but we were so hungry when we made it back in Hope. We had never thought there might be a chance we would have to spend the night on the highway.
We ended up being the lucky ones, able to do an u-turn. On our way back to Hope we measured 13 kilometers of stuck cars with hundreds of people having to spend the night in their cars. Based on news emergency crews had been sharing water and food to the people, stuck in their cars.
Our aim was to make it to Salmon Arm for the night and in Hope (at 11pm) we made the decision to give Highway 3 a try and drive all night through Okanagan Valley to get there. And it did take us all night, as we arrived at our hotel at 4:15am. Traffic after the midnight turned out to be almost non-existent, so we could drive fast and there was so much light from full moon on the sky, lighting our way. But boy, was it a rough drive and night.
After sleeping few hours in Salmon Arm, in the morning we continued to Revelstoke for a 1/2 day of skiing and then onwards to Golden, where I am now writing this.
Did anyone else have issues with the highways or have you ever spent a night stuck in your car in heavy snowfall? I cannot even imagine how they eventually managed to clear the whole road, but it didn't re-open before 10am today. So we were really lucky and the chaos didn't end up ruining our ski trip to the Rockies.
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