210205 Sentinel, Bad Roads

Driving with snow and ice on the roads is not one of my favorite things to do.

I posted this once before and as I looked at it today, that brought another fun memory to mind.

You can see in the picture that there is part of the road that is clear. Joyce and I thought the county had cleared the roads, so we left for work, me in the lead and her following. We went down our farm road and went up to the state highway. There we discovered that the highway had not been cleared. There were two ruts in the deep snow that had been been made by someone's 4 wheel drive pickup truck. There wasn't enough road cleared on our farm road to turn around so we went out on the highway following the ruts into the town of Ash Grove, hoping that we didn't meet anyone coming the opposite direction. We were half way there when a big 4 wheel drive pickup came driving the opposite way. That gentleman headed our way was kind enough to pull over to the roadside and let us pass. Once we got to Ash Grove and a more traveled state highway the state had cleared that. We got to work okay. I called Joyce and our daughter Annie and we decided to grab a pizza and meet at her house in town after work and wait for our roads to be cleared.They were cleared late in the day so we got home okay. It turned out that our neighbor to the north had a dairy farm and he needed to have the milk trucks get to his farm every day, so he had used his big tractor and snow plow to clear our road from his farm to the state highway. That was why our road looked nice and clear. We never fell for that trick again. Another memory from that time is this: when the county would clear our farm road their plow would push all the snow off to the roadside and I would have to shovel the highway egress from the foot of our driveway. I did that and by the next morning the county road plows would have passed by a second time and filled the egress again. The picture above was a particulary big snow. The county road plows had buried our mailbox. The picture is me trying to find the mail box.