Getting to Mexico 2 - Heading South

We had purchased walkie-talkies for the trip since we were going to be in separate cars. We were aiming to get to Sacramento that night around 11pm or midnight. But about 2 or 3 hours out of Portland, Luis changed lanes to get off the highway. He radioed me and said that something was wrong with the Jeep. We pulled into a gas station and opened the hood. He said he thought it was the battery. I suggested it might be the alternator since the car would still crank. He agreed, but pulled the battery and took off in the Murano for a nearby car parts store. Ten minutes later he radioed me and said it was the alternator. He could buy a new battery, but it would only last about 3 hours before it died too. In three hours we would be on the border of California and in the Sisquiu Mountain range. We decided we needed a new alternator, not a new battery.

As I sat in the car I wondered where we were going to find a mechanic at 5.30pm who could replace an alternator in a timely fashion. We'd lose at least one day. Then Luis pulled back into the parking lot, pulled out a rebuilt alternator and a socket wrench set. Then over the next hour and a half, he proceeded to pull out our old, dead alternator, install the new one, and get the car cranked back up. I knew he was pretty handy, but I didn't know he was *this* handy! What a score I had made!

Back on the road at 7.30pm, we realized that we probably wouldn't pull into Sacramento until very early in the morning. We still had the Sisquius to deal with, and the radio had said that the first winter storm had been plowing through the mountains that day. I thought maybe since it was the first storm nothing would really stick, it would just be slushy at the worst. No way to find out but to drive on....

As we climbed up and up, towards the highest point on the highway, the snow started to fall. We saw snow on the sides of the road. But we were almost at the top and it seemed fine, like the snow wasn't really sticking to the pavement. As soon as we crested the high point (some 4000 feet above sea level), the fog set in. Really thick fog. Fog that reduced visibility to about 40 feet. Luis was ahead of me and he slowed to a crawl, but kept going. I had both hands on the wheel and wasn't interested in taking one off to call him on the walkie talkie. So we kept going. A line of cars formed behind us, all of us giving each other wide berth, but not too far away so that we lost each other in the fog. The snow had started to stick and the road was slick, but I didn't see any black ice. About 5 miles of this and we descended enough for the snow to melt a bit, and the fog to lift. I called my mom to tell her that we weren't out of the mountains but we were through the worst of it. Little did I know....

Our next big landmark was the Mount Shasta area. About 20 miles before that, we started to see semi trucks parked in rest areas and on the side of the exit ramps. I'm not sure if Luis thought anything of this, but I started to think something was wrong. Then again I had heard that truckers had recently been legally limited to a certain number of hours on the road. Maybe they were all taking a break at the same time? We passed a sign saying "Chains required 20 miles ahead". One of the walkie talkies had a battery issue and they were both with Luis being charged, so I couldn't ask him what he thought of this. Another sign five miles later, and ever more trucks parked on the side of the exit ramps. Finally, about 10 miles from the required chains, I flashed the brights at Luis and we pulled over to discuss what to do. Of course we didn't have chains, and after going through the snow earlier I wasn't too excited about the prospect of what lay ahead. Let's just go on and see what the deal is, he said. So we went on.

Three miles before the required chains, a line of trucks parked along the side of the highway appeared. Something was up. I had never seen that many trucks just parked at the side of the road. It was a bit eerie. We slowed down and saw cars interspersed between the trucks, some with chains, some without. As we got closer even the trucks had chains on them. We pulled towards the head of the line and looked to see if there was a cop at the front checking for chains. There was. So we parked the cars on the left side of the road - there wasn't any space on the right side - shut down the Jeep, and we both sat in the Murano, preparing to have a long night amongst the truckers. Suddenly a cop car pulled up behind us. I thought maybe we weren't allowed to park on the left side, but the cop who walked up to my window said, "We just opened the road to cars. You should be fine. Have a safe trip." Wow, what timing we had! I asked how bad it had been. One and a half inches of ice, with people spinning off the road, which had been closed for hours. We both had 4 wheel drive and a lot of weight packed in our cars, which would help us over the next 50 miles.

We headed past the chain check point and into the snowy mess. It seemed ok for a while, but we were a few cars behind a snow plow. I remembered my experience with snow and ice in Maine a few years ago when I had run off the road, and gripped the steering wheel tighter. The snow plow pulled off and we were on our own. Other cars passed us, and we passed slower cars. Up and around the mountain. It was quiet and dark, with snow falling at times. I looked off to the side and saw tall pine trees covered with a heavy pack of snow. There was ice on the road, but it was freshly sanded or salted, I couldn't tell which. Both lanes were pretty open, surprisingly. Some time later - time seems to expand and contract in situations like this - I saw a snow plow blocking an on ramp in the opposite direction. A mile or so later i saw the trucks parked on the side of the road, waiting to be cleared to drive north through what we had just passed through. We had made it. It was 1.30 in the morning.

We kept driving a bit and reached Redding, California. We pulled off and checked at the first hotel we saw. No vacancies. So again, we closed up the Jeep, both jumped into the Murano and tried to sleep. After one hour, the cold woke me up. I didn't want to turn the car on, so I snuggled deeper under my leather jacket and tried to sleep again. But sleep eluded me for the most part. At 4.30am the alarm we had set went off. I was so cold I had trouble talking. I think my body temperature had dropped a bit more than it should have. I turned the car on, turned the seat warmer on, turned the heat on. And off we went.

continued....