Dagny, keep your pup with you.

From Wikipedia: "These nomadic reindeer herders bred the fluffy, white, smiling dogs to help with the herding, to pull sleds when they moved, and to keep their owners warm at night by sleeping on top of them."

Hey, two out of three isn't bad! Make sure you have a sturdy harness and a tow strap with you!

Sue

One interesting point here is that this was the NY state thruway, which is the main E-W corridor through NY, from Buffalo to Albany and then east becoming the Mass Pike to Boston. While it's a major route, it's otherwise pretty isolated in a lot of places, and typically wide open country.

I think in some places out west they have snow plows with differential GPS so they can drive in a white out, but I haven't heard of anybody in NY having them. I have friends in Buffalo and haven't ever heard them concerned about or even mention white-outs. With the lakes they get quite a bit more snow than I do here.

In this area, where I've been for about 20 years, I've only experienced conditions of really low visibility once, and it was still possible to generally see where the road was and travel about 20 mph. A complete white-out would be a bit spooky.

LOL - Samoyeds do give new meaning to three dog night.

I'm used to 8-9 feet tall poles along most exposed roads... usually with reflectors. Those poles really helps when plowing or driving in limited visibility. Of course, a differential GPS would be a great asset as well... but if it is THAT bad, the road should probably be closed anyway.




If it is below freezing, fresh snow will be of the dry, powdery kind. It takes only a fresh breeze (19-24 mph, level 5 on the Beaufort scale) to set that snow in motion to the point that it will seriously impart visibility. In a tree-less snow covered world, even being able to see as far as 200 yards will leave you in a all white bubble with no visual clues what so ever - and whatever you do see (small bush, exposed rock) will be severely blown out of proportions. In the woods, the trees are a tremendous help to provide a reliable, familiar visual reference. Also, the trees will shelter you from the wind.

Of course, when the wind picks up it only gets worse... I've been riding a snow mobile in conditions where we had to ride two on a machine because I knew that at the worst spot, my friend would have to walk in front of me so I had a visual reference - otherwise I would tip over in the next snow drift pile. At a distance of 20 feet, I could not see him in the worst wind gusts. And he could not see me: A big, fat dark target against a white background; smack in the middle of the dark blob there is a 60 watt halogen headlamp which you can't see at 20 feet.... We would stop at each wind gust and wait for it to subside, then continue. Snow blows along the ground, so I could still navigate by small glimpses of the rock face of the mountain to my left. It was a really weird experience, I knew all the time EXACTLY where we were and there were no real dangers (no cliffs or anything), but I could not see the 3 feet high snow drift piles right in front of me. That's what friends are for, right?


Conditions will vary tremendously with local terrain and wind conditions. In the story above with visibility down to about 2-3 feet, we had only to go about half a mile to enter into the next valley and there was hardly any wind, hardly any snow drift, we could see for miles... just a nice, overcast day. That was rather special, and shows just how much conditions can vary locally.

What I went awayfrom on this was that most people don't seem to be able to relize that the world is still dangerous. That the comon person thinks that the roads will always be pasable. People forget that sometimes mother nature will conqure man, and she will AWAYS win when she wants to.


I have a quad cab truck and often have to fill the center of the back seat with gear. Though I am thinking of adding a Taneau (totaly misspelled that word) to give the truck a bigger storeage area.


To add to the GPS thing, I did see a clip on a TV show talking about how Alaskan Snow Plow Drivers use GPS to stay on the road even when they can't see it. My thoughts on that is what happenes whne the GPS looses signal or the signal gets distored. I have had my GPS think that I was up to 30 feet off to the left or right when I was in heavy clowd cover. (disclaimer it is a Verizon Wireless cell GPS)

What I noticed was that though the drivers were being visited and having gas topped off by the athorities they never thought of extracting them. Why not put people in a sled or a ATV trailer and extract them to a warm place then return them once the plowing has resumed. Though it was 52 miles of highway, and I am here in my office and being a total armchair quaterback and wasn't there, so my thought is just that, and not intended to be a critisism. A Gama-Goat (again misspelled) from the Army could get through easly. but again just me being silly me.

The word you're lookin for is "tonneau" cover, although "truck bed cover" is a better description. I have one on my Ford Ranger; it allows me to carry a lot of gear year round. Highly recommended for those of us with trucks that only haul small stuff.

The GPS will detect this. It's part of Life As A GPS Receiver, and why some effort is needed to do it right.


30' is probably not far from the accuracy limit of a cell-phone GPS. A plow is probably using some kind of correction scheme not available to a cell-phone. Real-time Differential GPS is the likely choice.


1. The Highway patrol may have limited resources for operating in that kind of environment. It takes fewer snowmobiles to haul some fuel to stuck cars than to extract all of the people.

2. A lot of people will be reluctant to leave their cars behind - that car is a big financial asset to abandon for many people. They may also have valuables, pets, heirlooms etc they don't want to leave - the Highway Patrol doesn't want to get into that!

A consumer grade GPS can have an error like that 30ft, my new verizon phone has a gps and shows the error circle just like my garmin when I zoom in far.
High end GPS's are use to make the roads, the surveyor grade stuff is both very accurate and expensive, I've seen farming applications where the gps keeps the crop rows straight and tags where every seed is dropped.
I seem to recall a similar thing happening last year even. truck drivers were talking about it saying it wasn't a big deal for them with 50-100 gallons of fuel and a sleeper on the back of the cab with their bed, food, etc, they could stay for days.

I hope all those motorists were charged
for their rescue.

Didn't they read the weather forecast?

Sounds like candidates
for the Darwin awards.

I took the fiberglass tonneau off my truck and sold it and bought one of the roll up ones. Even though someone could easily slice through it so its less ecure it seemed like everything I ever hauled was just slightly talled than the sides of the bed to the hard tonneau wouldn't close. I prefer a truck cap but I switched to the roll up so I could take it off easily when I bought the camper.