It’s been a few weeks since our driveway turned into a hillside ice rink, and in those weeks we’ve been defeated twice. One morning we were heading to seminary (in the dark, as usual) and completely lost control of our car. We slid around 30 feet before coming to an uncertain stop, and immediately decided we weren’t going to keep going down. We texted all of the kids in our class right there to tell them not to show up that morning.
Yesterday things were good in the morning; a few warm(ish) days had melted some snow and shrunk the icy patches. We could even see gravel along stretches of the driveway! But it started to snow, and six hours later the driveway was covered in white. Now we couldn’t distinguish the “good areas” with traction on the gravel from the bad ones where there were still sheets of ice. This time, going downhill led to us sliding and spinning, eventually ending up stopped perpendicular to the driveway! Yikes. We pre-emptively cancelled seminary this morning.
So the ice beat us thrice, but we weren’t done fighting. We can’t keep cancelling things and hunker down in our house all winter. Last week we’d ordered some v-bar chains, which are specialized tire chains equipped with v-shaped spikes. They look like this:
Regular chains would just slide on the ice, but these things bite into it. Naturally they’re a pain to install, and since we only need them for the driveway (the roads are clear), it’s quite a chore to put them on at the house, drive down, and then take them off before heading out. Then again, it’s not like we have a lot of options. Today we slipped on the chains and headed down to pick up some packages that had been delivered.
Speaking of the packages, they were kind of funny:
I found a killer deal on monitors at Costco, so I ordered four of them. Of course we have a little mailbox (on the left in the photo) but any time we have packages, they’re placed in the blue bin we have a little off the highway. There’s no way UPS is going to come up the driveway to even the first switchback. I didn’t want all that equipment sitting in plain view of the road, so we had to go down to get them.
Anyway, after bringing the monitors up to the house, we turned around and went back down again and parked the car at the bottom. We took off the chains, and now it’s ready to drive out in the morning for seminary. We hiked back up wearing our crampons.
These things are amazing on the ice. They bite right in, and we don’t slip at all. I guess the v-bars are sort of like crampons for tires.
So, tomorrow we’ll get up extra early so we can don crampons and hike down in the black morning, climb into our cold car, and head out. This driveway sure doesn’t make things easy for us. But at least we have a way to defeat it now.