Eric had a tooth that needed to get worked on, and we love visiting family for the holidays. So we left on Sunday, December 30th to drive up to Portland with plans to stay and drive home on the following Saturday to have a day to rest before getting back into the daily grind.
Remember that Utah trip I told you about? Ya, this one far surpassed it.
We left our house in Nampa about 9 o'clock in the morning, hoping to hit the Blue Mountains around noon when the sun would be high and the snow hopefully would have melted off a little bit. There was solid fog from Nampa past Ontario, and minimal fog in Baker City. We drove the hour from Baker City and into La Grande which is the city just before you go over the Blues . . . and there we were routed off the freeway. We drove through town trying to get onto every freeway entrance possible and every single one was blocked off. A road worker told us there had been a bad accident on the Blues and that the road was closed, and probably wouldn't be open for 6 hours. That would have put us going over the Blues at 7 at night, which was definitely not a good idea.
After talking to some locals and discussing options with Eric's Dad who has a complete roadmap of the Northwest memorized, we decided that it would be best to drive the hour back to Baker City and then get on a state highway that would take us through Prineville, John Day, and then up and around Mount Hood into the backside of Portland. Going up over another huge mountain didn't seem like an awesome idea, but we were told the roads on the state highway were well maintained and that we shouldn't have any trouble with our heavy cleated snow tires and studs.
For the record, this is apparently what the Oregon Department of Transportation deems a well maintained state highway. That is a sheet of solid ice on the road.
It was extremely slow going. I don't think we ever went over 45 mph and most of the time we had to stay at about 30. Every few hours we'd say something like "really it's not that much farther, John Day has to be just around the corner" and then we'd see a sign that showed we had only traveled a few miles and John Day was still several hours away. We'd say things like "once we break into a city the roads will have de-icer on them" . .. only there are no cities on this route, just small little towns with weird names where Main Street consists of a post office and a church and everyone drives around on snowmobiles. I felt like for sure we were going to end up on an episode of "I Shouldn't Be Alive". We finally made it to Prineville which is a city of about 20,000 people (which felt like New York City compared to the cities we had been passing through all day) that is still about two hours (in normal weather) from Portland at about 7 o'clock at night.
Call me a wuss, but I was done. The kids were tired and sick of being in the car. We had seen way too many accidents and cars off the road to count. The last thing I wanted to do was try and drive up over Mount Hood in the pitch black at 11 o'clock at night. So we got a room and stayed in Prineville. We were up early the next morning to make the trip up over the mountain. And we finally made it to Portland at about 11am the Monday morning. Talk about a long trip.
I don't want to sound insensitive. I am so glad we made it safe and not the least bit upset that the freeway over the Blues was closed. The accident that happened on the Blues was terrible. A tour bus hit a patch of ice and fell two hundred feet down the mountain, killing 9 people and sending 30+ more to hospitals in 4 states. The bus was so far down the side of the mountain that they literally had to bring in Life Flight to careene down and latch onto people to take to the hospital. It's no wonder that road was closed, and my thoughts and prayers continue to be with those that were affected.
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