Improvement Era, 1953 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion

Our Snowstorm Adventure By S. Dilworth Young

OF THE FIRST COUNCIL OF THE SEVENTY

WE LEFT Salt Lake City, Elder LeGrand Richards and I, on the morning of Friday, March 20, under a cloudy sky and with three inches of new snow on the ground, but we were soon into good weather. By the time we reached Ogden, skies were clear and the road dry and safe. Our run to Butte was uneventful. The ride was extremely interesting to me, for Elder Richards is excellent company and has a vast field of interesting experiences and comments with which to keep a brisk, stimulating conversation going. There wasn't a dull moment the whole time.

At Butte, Montana, we received our first hint of trouble. The car radio brought in a report of a big storm crossing Glacier Park-heading east-with high winds and roads blocked from drifting. Deciding that we might need the extra time Saturday, if we had trouble, we drove to Helena for the night.

Consultation Saturday morning brought the decision to go to Great Falls. Here the road forked, one going straight north to Lethbridge, via Shelby, the other going west through Browning, skirting Glacier Park to Cardston. At this place we could consult the state highway police for direction. Elder Richards' conference was at Cardston; mine, at Lethbridge. At Great Falls we learned that either direction was bad; that people had traveled as far as Browning, but from there on was anybody's chance, while the road north appeared at the moment to be impassable beyond Shelby. We reasoned that if the storm were moving east, after three days of it, the western edge might be east of Browning by night. (This proved to be wrong, for the storm didn't move east until Sunday.) I asked Brother Richards what his impressions were. He said that he felt that we should go west to Browning and try for Cardston. He asked me how I felt. I upheld his feeling to go west to Browning.

We drove about twenty miles before we began to feel the storm. Another thirty miles and we were well into it. A hard driving wind whirled the falling snow, and the fallen snow, into one great blinding confusion. In places the road was blown clean and we could see the edges of it. Then almost immediately a rapidly forming drift would block us, and the road would be invisible. We did not dare to "go easy" through the drifts. We had to hit them at forty miles an hour to get enough momentum to clear them. Often they were piling up on curves so that we didn't know whether or not we'd be off the road into the ditch. Fortunately, we managed to keep equidistant from the fence posts which lined both sides of the highway-fifty feet out on each side. There was one time when the sky, the earth, the road, and the barrow pit were one great confusion. I could not tell where anything was, and there we hit our largest drift.

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