Snowstorm #3

We're climbing now, heading toward a 10,000 ft. pass, the highest point between us and Moab. It's not snowing yet, but it's cold and windy and you can smell the snow in the air. Eventually we reached the sweet spot—where the elevation of the road finally climbed up into the snow zone. This time (our 3rd snowstorm of the trip) the snow lasted almost 2 hours on a road that climbed twice to almost 10,000 feet. We changed the GPS view to show the elevation plot, and we kept an eye on it as it rose.

All along the road were gorgeous stands of aspen trees, not the stunted trees you often see at high elevations, but perfect huge trees. If it had been warmer (and there hadn't been a white-out), I would have been out with the camera. For eight years I've been looking for just this kind of aspen forest, so I can take a wide-angle photo of the white trunks. I'll just have to come back. We stopped once at a big overlook, where the sun was breaking through clouds, giving us a wide panorama of mountains the in the background and canyons in the foreground. But the snow kept blowing, and we had to keep going.

Snow like this in May is probably not unheard of around here. But an MX-5 Miata doesn't play well in a snowstorm, and it doesn't wear tire chains. So we were relieved to finally drop below the snow zone. We stopped for a photo of the snow plow schedule, just as a group of motorcycles headed up the road toward the pass. They were in for a cold ride.