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Yesterday's drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico was uneventful. It happens to be located almost exactly halfway between Phoenix and Denver so I decided to stop after about eight hours instead of pushing on.
This morning I added fifty gallons of fuel to my tanks to get by then headed towards Denver. Believe it or not, fuel in Denver is cheaper than Albuquerque or Winslow, Arizona at the moment! With any luck it will remain so at least until tomorrow when I fill up.
Leaving just before dawn it quickly became apparent that today's trip would be much different. Within thirty minutes there were stiff gusts of wind and snow flurries, and as I climbed towards Santa Fe the roads began to be covered in sand and the shoulders filled with ice and snow. Conditions deteriorated as I moved north towards the Raton pass at the border to Colorado and it was down to one lane scraped clean and the hammer lane left icy.
Despite that, the temps below before crossing were in the low 20's and at the top of the pass, several thousand feet higher, it was 31 degrees! Quite unusual.
Conditions on the north side worsened a bit with more snow showers. About fifteen minutes north of the pass a black SUV tried gunning it around my rig and instead found himself spun out in the median. An hour later, a different black SUV tried the same thing and veered violently left into the median, went through to the other side on two wheels, crossed the southbound lanes (thankfully empty) and ran off the far side of the road through a fence! You would think locals would understand how to drive in ice and snow, but throughout the day there were numerous examples of poor driving that didn't have such abrupt endings.
I only stopped once during the trip at a rest area to use the facilities, which is when I saw the sides of my truck decorated with black ice, sludge, sand and whatnot. This is what she looked like a few hours later after I arrived in Denver at my first stop:
I saw this curious ceramic-like substance in my wheel wells and it took me a bit to figure out what it was... try your hand at it and I'll explain further down:
The brown substance was a layer of the clayish sand they lay down in New Mexico that built up first on my truck. Later, layers of black ice, tar, etc. went down on top of it making that combined look that you see.
Here's a closeup of some of that stuff having peeled off of a nut on my truck -- note the exact replica in the clay!
Here is a picture of my fifth wheel, shocks and airbags along the passenger side showing how completely they are covered by the muck:
You can view the entire album here.
Interesting coincidence: as I was driving north along I-25 my CB lit up. "Hey Hill Brothers, is that Jim T. driving?"
Turns out someone who is familiar with my adventures aside from my mom (there are a few of you out there) saw me running by. He used to work at Hill Brothers but now drives for someone else. There wasn't time to get many details due to the limitations of the CB range but it was fun meeting with someone electronically at least.
