Slip sliding away
posted in Alaska |When I lived in the S.F. Bay area, I often thought that if the area had any sort of winter weather at all, it would never have gained the popularity and population that it has. Mainly I was thinking of the effect ice would have on life there.
So here I am in Alaska, coming to the last third of my first winter here. We’ve dealt with large amounts of snow that pile up and pack down on the roads. We’ve dealt with darkness…deepest, darkest darkness. We’ve dealt with weeks’ worth of below zero weather.
Now. Now we have Nice Weather! Sunshine! Temperatures in the 30s and lower 40s, or more! And the dangers that have lurked beneath that snowpack are swiftly being revealed.
To wit: Ice.
Snow-packed roads and driveways are a pain (you have no idea where the road edge really is, and have to blindly follow the drivers before you, like a lemming, hoping that they’ve got a better idea than you). But the snowpack is, really, eminently driveable. Underneath the packed snow, however, is packed snow that has become ice. And when the sun shines on that ice and warms it up, you get a nice slick layer of cold water on top of ice. And when the temperature still drops beneath 32F at night, you get more ice. Nice, smooth, slick, slippery ice.
Drivers on the main roads around town have worn down all the ice and the roads are clear. On the side roads, not as much. And driveways? Ack. The phrase "sheet of ice" applies.
Our driveway has a gentle incline, so while our wheels give a few spins here and there as we go up to the house, so far it’s been okay.
But some of our neighbors…their driveways are going up a hill. It’s nothing compared to the hills of the Bay Area, but it’s still more of an incline than our driveway. During my smoke breaks in the past few days, I’ve watched twice as visitors to my neighbors have striven (strived?) to drive up the driveways, only to reach a point where the car wheels completely stop gripping the road and their cars slowly and gently start sliding downwards in what ends up being a sideways motion.
My assumption was that people who have lived in Alaska a long while know how to drive on ice. Right? Wouldn’t you think that’s a fairly natural assumption to make?
Living in the mountains of the southwest, for us ice was a rare event. Oh, we got lots of huge snows. But generally the strength of the sunlight would melt through the snow before it ever really became ice. So we’d get–maybe–two or three days when the roads up to the higher portions of Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods would become icy enough that we’d have to either do some fancy maneuvering up the icy spots or else try one of the less steep roads up.
But honestly. That was enough driving on ice to give us some basics. Like, if you’re sliding downwards, sideways, on a driveway, perhaps the best thing to do would be to turn your car wheels so that you’re not going sideways? After all, aiming your car in the direction the car is moving allows a certain amount more control. And perhaps punching on the accelerator as you’re going downhill is a bad idea? And perhaps you should tap on the brakes a few times as you’re going downhill so that you don’t do a fine out-of-control donut at the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the driveway and smash your car into the eight-foot-high bank of packed snow leftover by the snowplows. All of which has happened.
There, but for the grace of God, go I. We would never have considered the incline of the driveway when thinking of the house we were purchasing. We thought about floodplains. We thought about commute distance for OmegaDad. We thought about being as far away as possible from the trains and the highways. But ice? Didn’t even think of it.
