Return to Greensburg & Thanksgiving '08

Kicking off the 2008 festive season with Thanksgiving, Sarah and I decided to drive back to Oklahoma to visit friends and family. On Wednesday afternoon we got organized and headed out along I-70 east all the way into Kansas, with some fun traffic dodging through Denver and then averaging 90mph to the border and avoiding the highway police ;) Sarah had booked a Comfort Inn at Colby, which we arrived at way too early and realised we should have avoided booking and covered as many miles through the plains in the dark as possible. Still, after a good sleep and getting up in the dark, we watched an awesome Kansas sunrise across the flat expanse of crops.

Detouring through back country Kansas we went south from Hays to get to Greensburg. For those who haven't read my earlier post about Greensburg, the town was completely destroyed by the first official EF5 rated tornado under the new enhanced fujita scale in May 2007, a mile and a half wide specimen of the most destructive winds on earth that stripped bark from trees, removed houses from their foundations and changed forever the lives of the people in its way. I went there to volunteer aid and made friends with a local fellow named Gary and helped him load what was left of his family belongings out of his sodden basement to a trailer.

Gary wasn't in the area unfortunately for me; he was in Kansas City visiting his son, so I called his cell as I came into town and spoke to him as he directed me to where his house was; now one of several bulldozed blocks apparently re-zoned to commercial where they intend to relocate the main road through town. The old lady's house across the road from Gary has been restored with a new shell, as she's 97 or something and her family & the community want her to live there the rest of her days. Looking around, a sense of devastation still prevails over the rebuilding, both from the presence of the original, the damaged, but also the absence, particularly in streets intersecting brown blocks of bulldozed dirt. Some destroyed trees remain, a few bent lightpoles, and Gary has bought one of two surviving main street buildings for an authentic angle to his antiques business. Small but encouraging, new development is centered around main street, with a new store and service station and other bits and pieces. I'm sure eventually a good number of original residents will rebuild and move back, and the town will be lush and vibrant again, but the road to recovery will be a while.

Thanksgiving was great, with two meals at two houses for both sides of Sarah's family, we ate until we were sore, and I still didn't put on any weight. The Bedlam Game was on saturday, OU vs OSU (Oklahoma University vs Oklahoma State University) in college football, and the stakes were high. If OU beat OSU, there would be a 3-way tie for who represents the south in the Big 12 conference between Texas, Texas Tech and OU. Then the various polls would decide who gets to play Missouri, winner of the north Big 12. After an epic game and some soon-to-be-immortalized acrobatics by OU's quarterback Sam Bradford, OU whooped OSU by 20 points for the 6th 60+ point total running. The next day around midday when Sarah and I were driving back to Colorado via New Mexico, text messages and calls started coming in about news that OU had made it to the championships, Texas and Texas Tech missing out. This was sweet justice as Texas had flown a plane over the OSU stadium with a banner showing the score when they beat OU, and the lobbying Texas Coach kept going on about how they beat OU blah blah how they should win, while the OU coach and quarterback spoke along the lines of we did our best, we'll keep doing our best and whatever the polls decide is what they decide. Texas' bad sportsmanship before the polls was matched after the polls, everyone wanted to interview the sore loser Texas coach, and it's sweet revenge for OU. No doubt it will just stoke the fire more for next year's game in one of the nation's biggest rivalries.

The drive back was going smoothly until we pulled into a gas station at Texline on the New Mexico border and saw cars coming from the opposite direction coated in snow and ice. After pulling a half dozen tumbleweeds from the front grill, I chatted to some people who came from that direction and they said it was a white out. Sure enough, the hundreds of tumbleweeds we'd been dodging changed to horizontal snow in winds that were probably 50mph in places. Then a couple of dozen miles into NM the road disappeared under a sheet of ice and blowing snow, and we began passing car wrecks, sedans in the ditch with bumpers torn off, trucks on their roofs with cabins totally crushed. We were still cruising at 30-40mph till we hit traffic which slowed us to a crawl, and it took us 2 hours to get through the last dozen miles. One car had even slid off the road, down the banks, 8m across a flat and through a barbed wire fence into a paddock! There were also no ploughing vehicles to be seen, NM doesn't care as much as CO about their highway road conditions (makes sense if they don't even bother to signpost some of their roads).

Colorado ended up being worse; I took this route to have a view instead of flat, straight Kansas, and we ended up with no view and a foot of snowfall, stuck again before Monument for 2.5 hours. I nearly wrecked when a slower car in the right lane with an ignorant retarded driver tried to overtake another car just as I was about to pass and I slid for several seconds, ABS vibrating, towards his bumper before he accelerated enough to pull away. After dinner, Sarah was falling asleep at the wheel in stopped traffic, so we skidded around the car to switch after I had an hour's rest. We finally got past Monument (all the hold ups were caused by a simple hill; no wrecks or anything, just a combination of retarded drivers and incapable vehicles), and we got to I-70 just before midnight. Fortunately the traffic delays of the day (up to 5 hours for some I heard later) had gone, and I cruised at 40mph all the way, through the worst road conditions I'd ever seen. The tunnel is a strange sanctuary in bad weather, you relax but try to prepare for the other side, and then emerge into awesome blowing snow, the road was totally buried and was just a large white surface which I just drove down the center of. Seconds after exiting the tunnel I saw a snow tornado whirling across the highway and I hit it straight on and for a couple of seconds couldn't see anything but white. But the AWD Subaru held it together and got us home safely, even without snow tyres!

Next day at work I found the following stats from the weekend:
A-basin 35" in 3 days
Vail 25" in 2 days
Beaver Creek 11' in 2 days
Copper 28' in 3 days

As well as an avalanche warning from weather.gov:

...AVALANCHE WARNING ISSUED FOR THE FRONT RANGE AND CONTINENTAL DIVIDE FROM THE WYOMING BORDER TO HOOSIER PASS IN SUMMIT COUNTY...

A POWERFUL WINTER STORM SYSTEM BROUGHT SNOWFALL IN EXCESS OF FOUR FEET PLUS VERY STRONG WINDS TO THE WARNING AREA SINCE THANKSGIVING DAY. STRONG WINDS GUSTS UP TO 100 MPH HELPED CREATE DANGEROUS AVALANCHE CONDITIONS.

A NUMBER OF AVALANCHES HAVE BEEN TRIGGERED OVER THE LAST 12 HOURS. SOME OF THESE SLIDES WERE RUNNING TO THE GROUND, TAKING OUT THE WINTER SNOWPACK TO DATE.

So that was my eventful Thanksgiving!