Sundance is exciting. You are always on the move, on the phone, emailing or networking. Quite honestly, it is exhausting. I averaged about 4-5 hours of sleep for over a week. To make matters worse, I came down with a horrible cold right when I got there. By the second week, I think I came down with a new cold from someone else. Great place for a pharmacy. Lots of strangers shaking hands, coughing…a perfect place for the perfect cold.
We were all excited to keep daily blogs up while we where there. Unfortunately, our internet connection was not working for the last five days in town. Not the best time to lose connections to the outside world, especially when you are there to show the world what it is all about. So, this Monday, January 28th, Phil and I are the last of our big group to leave. Everyone else left either on Saturday or Sunday. When I woke up Monday morning, snow was falling. Did you know that it snows a lot in Park City?
Well, there was already about 8 inches of fresh snow from the night. My thought process was that it was tapering off. My thought process was way off. That was just the start. Phil and I left our condo around 11:30 am and had a couple of errands to run, before heading back to Salt Lake City to catch our 5pm flight. The snow kept getting harder, the wind kept getting stronger. By 12:30, we start to head out to highway 80, the only way back to the airport. Now, what would normally be a quick few minute drive really turned bad, fast.
It took us about an hour to go 2 miles. At one point, I couldn’t see the cars in front of us, and we weren’t moving. I get on the phone with my wife Erika and ask her to check weather and traffic. She then tells me that 80 is closed until further notice due to multiple accidents and weather. I tell Phil that at some point, we will have to decide if we should turn back and find a hotel for the night. We are two big tough bald guys from Chicago and the last thing I want to have to do is to have to cuddle next to Phil to stay warm at night. That sentence just gave me the willies.
We decide to sit it out and hope it gets better. A few hours pass and a sheriff walks by us and says that the highway will be opening up soon. Now, it’s about 3:30. Our flight takes off at 4:52m except for the fact that the planes are now delayed. My wife has been our emergency notification point person, who informs us that our plane is also delayed. Well, we make it on the highway and go about 30 mph most of the way. We see trucks, cars but mostly big 4×4’s with big lifts and tires that are of the road. The area already had about 3-4 feet of snow, so it really doesn’t matter what you drive, if you slip off the road into a snow drift, you are screwed. We even saw one of those huge highway snowplow trucks stuck in a ditch.
Below is a picture that I took with my iPhone, around 1pm. I had to brighten it up a bit, since it was even darker and it was hard to make anything out. The gods were angry that we were leaving. No worries, we’ll be back!
