Winter Travel

This hasn't been much of a winter so far.  Hopefully that changes, or this Spring is going to be really grim.  

But that doesn't mean there hasn't been any weather at all, and as luck would have it, I recently traveled through some of it.  This isn't that unusual, I've had it happen zillions of times, and in much worse weather than I recently experienced.  I guess because the weather has been so good recently I became a bit spoiled about it, while as in most winters I just expect to travel through some bad weather every winter.

Perhaps the worst driving condition weather I've ever driven through, in a work context, was when going to Denver a few years ago for a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals argument.  It snowed the day prior, and just a few miles outside of town it became evident that the road was horrifically dangerous.  I actually thought of turning around and getting an airplane ticket to Denver instead, and had my wife call on it, but by the time I had the answer, it was too late and I carried on.  On other occasions I've driven through heavy snow when a driver shouldn't really be out.  This week, the roads were in really bad condition in Northeastern Wyoming, but not as bad as I've sometimes seen.  The weather, particularly in Rapid City, was also extremely cold, which has not been the norm this winter either.

Anyway, as this blog is supposed to explore historical changes, it occurred to me that I wondered how this was experienced in earlier eras for people traveling for the same reason.  It occurred to me that it was frankly just unlikely that it would have been done the same way, to the same extent.  Lawyers, at any rate, traveled somewhat less in earlier decades.  Probably travel like this became common in the 1950s.  In the 50s, in a car, I would have had to pull over by Sundance the other day, and the depositions would have had to cancel.  A person wouldn't have taken a 4x4 pickup truck of that era that kind of distance.

Before that, say in the 40s and earlier, I don't think this would have been done that often.  Probably if an out of state deposition needed to be taken some other arrangement, such as a train trip to a larger city, would have been undertaken.  Be that as it may, prior to the 1960s, not many depositions were taken in most civil cases, so the occasion to do something like this would have been much less common.  If we go back to the 1930s or earlier, depositions in general were pretty rare, and just basically didn't occur at all.  There were out of town court appearances and arguments, however, but the planning for them was probably generally more advanced in some ways, and people presumably more cautious about setting out in the weather.  In the automobile era, that was no doubt always dangerous, although when more trains were around, that was no doubt the preferred method of travel.

Of course, you couldn't always go everywhere by train, and there was an era prior to common automobile travel.  In that era, when weather couldn't easily be predicted, winter travel must have been hazardous in the extreme.