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Is a cross-country drive this time of year suicidal?

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I don't see why it would be suicidal this time of year. Like 10 years ago, my family moved cross-country from NY to CA around this time.
 
Well where I am at (CO) there are currently 30MPH winds and it's snowing pretty good. Started around 6AM this morning and hasn't stopped yet. Pretty much blizzard conditions. Roads are closed. DIA is shut down.

If you go south you can probably get around most of this bad weather, but there was a storm in NM too.

It would kinda suck to go south and then have to go way back up to OR. Right now you wouldn't get over many mountain passes here. But that will change. Snow should be cleared from roads in the next couple days.
 
Originally posted by: DLeRium
Why I-10 though? What about I-40?
Click to expand...

Yeah I-40 should be good, though currently there will be some bad weather in NM, but I-40 is currently still open. I-25 north to CO is closed...I-25 is closed pretty much from Raton Pass to Denver.
 
I think you'll be alright.

You're going to have a bunch of weight in the truck bed...that'll keep your rear tires firmly planted to the terrain you're traveling on.

You'll have chains just in case it gets real hairy...

What kind of tires do you have on it? Winter tires? Probably not eh? Maybe some good All-Terrains?

Why are you moving back to Oregon? Man...I tell you what, I miss it there!
 
OK I had a chance to look up I-10, that's REALLY south... I'd really rather not go that far out of the way. 40 isn't much better.

I guess I need to do some more careful route consideration & look at weather forecasts for specific times in specific places... That would probably help considerably.

The tires on the truck are pretty decent, I think. I know next to nothing about such things but my brother says they do great in snow.

Viper GTS
 
IMHO don't consider I-70 or US 160 (southern CO) for crossing the Rockies. You're either going to have to gut it out and take I-80, or drop all the way down and take I-40.

Another thought would be I-90, which would be quicker than I-40 by a lot. I have absolutely no idea what the weather is like up there, but you could make an on-the-fly decision based on weather reports which you take. Heading west from Pittsburgh you'd have to decide in Indianapolis. I-74 for I-80 and I-90, or I-70 to I-44 for I-40. Then if you went north you'd have till Omaha to decide to stay on I-80 or detour north to I-90.
 
I've done it with no issues. Six years ago I moved from Bremerton, WA to PA a week before Christmas. I was driving a Galant VR4 with 4 good snow tires so I was quite a bit better off in the vehicle category. The mountain passes weren't all that bad. Where it started getting hairy was when I stopped in Idaho to visit a friend and I was literally the only car on the road. The snow was piled up very high on both sides of the road and it was still at least a foot deep on the road. People in big 4x4 trucks were giving me weird looks as they drove past me going the other way. The Galant had no issues with it though.

The only scary moment I had was around Omaha, Nebraska. Snow was swirling across the highway but everything seemed fine to me. I crested a hill on the highway and for as far as the eye could see there were cars and trucks off the road. They were pointed in every which way, some of them upside down. That was when I had a real Oh s**t moment. Evidentally there had been a really bad ice storm the previous day and these vehicles were all still stuck.
 
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