Snow!

My wife and I decided to go to the grand canyon. We planned to drive from sacramento through Yosemite, down through death valley over to Las Vegas, over to Zion and then to the Grand Canyon.

We figured since it was late April, there would be no problem getting throught any roads because the snow surely had melted by then. Boy were we wrong.

We drove from Sacramento and as we got closer to Yosemite, we kept seeing signs that the road was closed. We assumed that they had just not taken the signs down yet because it had been hot. Well sure enough the road through was closed so we had to drive south and try to cut through at the Sequoia National forrest but low and behold the road was closed there as well. We stayed the the night in some one horse town and set out to get to Vegas.

We drove further south through Bakersfield and on through Death Valley. We were told that death valley was in full bloom and beautiful. We saw dirt, dirt and more dirt, but no flowers. We made it to Vegas that night but every hotel was booked. Dirty, hot, and tired we came to Caesers and the clerk took pitty on us and gave us their last room. The room turned out to be a 1300 sq foot suite. So far the highlight of the trip.

We left Vegas the next morning heading to the Grand Canyon. We went through Zion without a hitch and it was beautiful. Just outside Zion I just happened to stop at a tourist trap and mentioned to the man at the shop that we were on our way to the Grand Canyon. He informed us that the north rim was sniowed in and we whould have tio drive around through Arizona and enter through the south rim. I couldn't believe it. We turned around and headed to Bryce Canyon which was also partialy snowed in but beautiful still the same.

I decided we needed to start heading home and was determined to get to Nevada. We drove and drove and drove and made it into nevada but there were no hotels to be found. As we got off the Extraterestrial Highway we began to climb a mountain. It was about 9pm and started to rain. The it started to snow and hard. It snowed so. Bad that we could not see more than 3 feet in front of the car. I followed the tire tracks from a car that was 5 minutes ahead of us and prayed that the hadn't driven into a ditch because I would have followed right behind them. We drove about 20 mhp for 10 more minutes and then we saw the sign saying we were at the summit. My wife and I cheered and a few minutes later, the skys cleared and all was good. We made it a small town, grabbed a room and went to sleep.

We drove the next day through Reno and as we went over the summit we were stopped and required to put on chaines. I couldn't believe the luck. MORE SNOW!!!!

We finally made it home and we look back on this trip as a really good time even though we had so many difficulties.

Terje Miller