Winter Driving In Western Oregon

It's been seven months now since I went back to work (for someone else), but until Tuesday, when I headed over to do the coast route, I'd yet to drive in what I would consider bad weather. Yes, it's rained quite a bit over the last few months, but that's fairly normal, and we'd never go anywhere if we avoided driving in it.

Snow, sleet, and freezing rain is a different matter, though, and thank goodness I didn't encounter the latter. The only real trouble I've ever had was after some freezing rain, since you can't really see it. Wound up in a ditch once because of it. Thankfully, the ditch wasn't very wide or deep, and there was someone who came by and helped get my car back on the road.

I thought I'd show you images of the different conditions I encountered as I traveled over the coastal mountains and then along Highway 101 between Newport and Lincoln City.

The road I take to get to Toledo and Newport is Highway 20. It's the shortest and most direct route, but it does elevate above 500 feet in a couple of places, which on Tuesday was enough to get some snow. The above image is taken along the foothills of the higher elevations. There was a rain/snow mix coming down hard enough that the windshield wipers just managed to keep up, but the snow was mainly accumulating just on the side of the road.

Farther along, after some sleet, the skies started to lighten up, so I could see a little better. Above, the evergreens have snow on them as well as the side of the road, and there was more of the white stuff than what what I was able to capture. This was about 10 miles from the first image, so the storm was not that wide and had already passed through here.

It was through this stretch of road that I actually skidded for an instant, not enough to lose control with but enough to cause alarm. There really wasn't much to see on the road, though, so whatever it was blended in with the dark of the blacktop.

Another 10 miles or so, coming back down toward sea level, the clouds parted completely, and whatever snow there might have been (if any) had melted. Temperatures as I drove through these areas ranged from 32 to 39 degrees fahrenheit.

I was actually happy to see this, since I was concerned I might be in trouble. Snow was threatened all along the 10-day forecast, starting with three days worth before finally settling down to one. And then when it happened, it turned out to be manageable, thankfully. There may have been areas up north and east that got hit much more, though, but I didn't have to travel there, and actually avoiding coming back east from Lincoln City because of what was expected out there.

This is one of the strips of beach that you can access from Highway 101 just outside of Newport. This is during high tide and on the tail end of a winter storm, so the surf came all the way up into the rocks and toward the hill. In other places, it was actually making it up the vertical banks a few dozen feet or so to spray up along the road.

And yet, just before Lincoln City, the water looks relatively calm. This is an inlet, though, largely protected by an outcropping of land you can see a sliver of in the upper left side. It's hard to tell from the image, but I could see the rougher surf at the horizon.

All along the mountain road and then along the coast there were plenty of places where it had flooded, probably from snow melt and just precipitation accumulation in general. We've had a lot of the wet stuff over the course of the last 30 days, like it's trying to make up for all the nice weather we've had over the course of the last two winters. All that stored up energy is finally manifesting.

Fortunately, it's not been too heavy to the point where it starts crossing roads and into people's houses, though no doubt somewhere, particularly along the coast, something like that has happened. We just haven't had as much rain as we typically do, so the ground has been soaking up more of it than it might other years. However, at some point, the water table will be up high enough that it reaches total saturation, and more rain on top of it will mean the run off has no where else to go but across fields, ditches and roads into places no one wants it to go.

This is a somewhat better shot of the choppy waves, though it still doesn't do them justice. During the summer months, the waves can get high, but they roll or undulate, while these were being driven by wind along the surface. The air was pretty cold, too, standing at the wayside where I took this picture. The wind at the coast isn't ever warm per se, but this was as about as cold as I've felt it. Temperatures along here though were the warmest anywhere, fluctuating between 39-43 degrees fahrenheit.

The coast route takes about six hours to complete, counting the trip in. Add another hour to an hour and a half for the return. So, the six preceding pictures were all taken between 9:30 AM and 3:30 PM. This last one was taken around 4:30 PM, several minutes before sunset, this time eastbound on Highway 20. I took it because as the semi and I came up the hill and rounded a corner, we left the partly sunny weather on the coast and headed into what appeared to be a fog bank from this vantage point.

Thankfully, it was more like low lying clouds that were still far enough off the ground that we didn't have to go through it.

On the return trip, though, I actually slid for a few seconds, so quite a bit longer than when it happened coming over. When it started, I took my foot off the gas and turned the wheel ever so slightly away from the direction of the skid, which wanted to take me out of the fast lane and into the guardrail. Fortunately, there weren't cars directly ahead or behind me so I was able to right myself without worrying about what the others might do.

This was on a downgrade as it was getting darker, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to encounter it, as all the vehicles behind me slowed down, too.

Apparently, it snowed near where I live, but I didn't see any of it coming down or on the ground when I came through there around 6 PM. In our part of the Willamette Valley, we just don't get a whole lot of snow, but if we do, it's normally sometime in January.

As long as it only threatens, but doesn't deliver, I think I will be fine.

_{All images courtesy of Glen Anthony Albrethsen}