Damn, I love my 4Runner!
I took the day off to go snowboarding and headed up to our local Mountain. It's a smaller mountain with a one-lane-each-way road going up.
Here in CA, we've had a series of 5 storms in a row, and all of them dumped a lot of snow. So I left a bit earlier than usual. All the way up the mountain it was snowing heavily and there were no highway patrol checkpoints setup. I was happy because not to many people were on the road.
So I'm driving through the snow and my baby is doing fine! It was snowing pretty good. I was in 2nd gear and going slow over the completely snow covered road. In some areas, it was down to one lane from the snow piled high.
Then I get to about 10 miles from the mountain and there is a crash. A snowplow coming down the mountain locked horns with a truck and raked the side of the truck. Their metal intertwined, they were stuck together and blocking the road. Over the next 2.25 hours, more and more cars showed up and eventually there was a line of more than 50+ cars behind me and another 30+ in front of me. After pushing the truck out of the way, the Plow slid from the crown of the road into the snow embankment and got stuck. Then another plow came and it got stuck! Then some lady in a freaking 90's oldmobile slid sideways and got stuck! It was a mess up there! Luckily all this was incredibly low-speed accidents, so nobody hurt, only damaged cars/egos.
After finally getting through the crash area, it started snowing hard! I somehow ended up being lead vehicle! It was super flat lighting and I could barely see through the windshield which was icing up. In fact I almost ran into a snowbank because I couldn't see the road turned left. So I kicked the windshield heater on high to fight the ice and that definitely helped.
I also had to constantly shift from 2L to L and back to 3, because the road goes up and down on the way to the mountain. I didn't want to get to much speed. Everything worked flawlessly! Road were complete whiteout. No pavement could be seen at all. I plowed my way to the Summit and got there with at 12:30pm which is about 3 hours left to ride before closing. The powder was mega deep in some spots (6' +) and it was pretty insane. First time I used every gear on a trip and everything went so smooth and I never slid once on the 30k mile stock tires in 4WD. I love my 4Runner!
I took the day off to go snowboarding and headed up to our local Mountain. It's a smaller mountain with a one-lane-each-way road going up.
Here in CA, we've had a series of 5 storms in a row, and all of them dumped a lot of snow. So I left a bit earlier than usual. All the way up the mountain it was snowing heavily and there were no highway patrol checkpoints setup. I was happy because not to many people were on the road.
So I'm driving through the snow and my baby is doing fine! It was snowing pretty good. I was in 2nd gear and going slow over the completely snow covered road. In some areas, it was down to one lane from the snow piled high.
Then I get to about 10 miles from the mountain and there is a crash. A snowplow coming down the mountain locked horns with a truck and raked the side of the truck. Their metal intertwined, they were stuck together and blocking the road. Over the next 2.25 hours, more and more cars showed up and eventually there was a line of more than 50+ cars behind me and another 30+ in front of me. After pushing the truck out of the way, the Plow slid from the crown of the road into the snow embankment and got stuck. Then another plow came and it got stuck! Then some lady in a freaking 90's oldmobile slid sideways and got stuck! It was a mess up there! Luckily all this was incredibly low-speed accidents, so nobody hurt, only damaged cars/egos.
After finally getting through the crash area, it started snowing hard! I somehow ended up being lead vehicle! It was super flat lighting and I could barely see through the windshield which was icing up. In fact I almost ran into a snowbank because I couldn't see the road turned left. So I kicked the windshield heater on high to fight the ice and that definitely helped.
I also had to constantly shift from 2L to L and back to 3, because the road goes up and down on the way to the mountain. I didn't want to get to much speed. Everything worked flawlessly! Road were complete whiteout. No pavement could be seen at all. I plowed my way to the Summit and got there with at 12:30pm which is about 3 hours left to ride before closing. The powder was mega deep in some spots (6' +) and it was pretty insane. First time I used every gear on a trip and everything went so smooth and I never slid once on the 30k mile stock tires in 4WD. I love my 4Runner!
