Be careful out there. . . and how we go when we didn't used to.

Highway near Casper, January 30.

We're entering Wyoming's snow season.

We really aren't there yet.  Generally, April is the month of the year where we really get hit with snow.  But we're starting to see more of it, and we got hit by a heavy wet snow on Friday and Saturday.  Indeed, it felt like an April snow, rather than a late January one, which generally feels like getting hit with frozen sandpaper.

Those trucks (there are two of them) are out in that snowstorm.  They're off the road.  I thought that they'd slipped off, and the back one probably did.  When I passed them, they were chaining it up. The driver in the front truck had walked back to help the other driver chain his truck up.  Chaining was probably necessary to get it out of the ditch.

Truck drivers have to drive in weather like this all the time. But, in Wyoming, so do a lot of other people.  Ranchers, to be sure, but also oilfield workers and, as odd as it may seem, lawyers.  In the old, old days, lawyers rode a circuit by horse, today in the Rocky Mountain West they ride it by 4x4.  Our travel is dictated solely by our schedule, not by the weather.  We occasionally have to cancel something due to the weather, but that's rare.  Usually, if things are going to get really bad, we try to get there a day prior if we can, and then we have to ride it out wherever we are.

I've written on it many times here, but this is one of the things that's really changed, in this region, about how we live just since World War Two.  The only 4x4s in the US prior to the Second World War were heavy industrial trucks.  4x4s came onto the civilian market right after World War Two, their worth having been proven by the war.  But the only "light" 4x4s that were offered at first were Jeeps.  4x4 trucks came on, but they were heavy trucks and appealed only to industry, ranchers, and serious sportsmen.  That really didn't change until the 1960s, when lighter 4x4s started to be relatively common around here.  By the 1970s they were pushing out 2x4s, and vehicles like Suburbans and Travelalls were common.  In the 1980s "Sports Utility Vehicles" started coming in, and now they're everywhere.  Most SUVs are pretty good in snow, but I still drive a 1 ton 4x4 on the highway in snow.  It's very dependable and safer than nearly any other alternative.

But, having said all of that, there's really no safe driving in weather like this. But because we can do it, we do.  And some of us have to.  A real change since 1945.