My primary route to and from Idaho from my hardened underground bunker in the Seattle area is via I-90 which goes over Snoqualmie Pass. The pass has been closed since, I think, Tuesday evening. My alternate route over the Cascades is via Stevens and then Blewett Passes. Currently Stevens is open but Blewett is closed.
And as Phil pointed out yesterday I can’t go south to Portland and then up the Columbia because of flooding on I-5. Plus it adds about four hours to my trip which makes it impractical for a weekend visit to Idaho.
Crews are supposedly working around the clock to clear Snoqualmie pass and repair the flooding damage to I-90 in the vicinity of the pass. I may be able to get over by Friday night but I won’t know until at least mid-morning.
For those of you that have a personal interest because you or a friend need to get over Snoqualmie on a regular basis I’ve created a tiny URL for the text based version (best for cell phone browsers) that is easy to remember http://www.tinyurl.com/snoqpass.
Update: Snoqualmie Pass is now (15:30 Friday) open in both directions. Other than some flooding and missing sections of a few roads near home in Idaho, which shouldn’t really be a problem, things look like a “Go”. Follow my Twitters this evening if you find yourself so bored with your own life that you think mine is more interesting than yours.
As far as my friends and I could tell, the only place we could reliably go to was Vancouver. The passes to the east were avalanched in, the I-5 to the south was all flooded out…
If you’re a religious man, it really does pose the question, “Does God hate Seattle?”
Joe,
It appears to be VFR all the way…. just saying, ya know?
PeterT
I looked into getting my pilots license several years ago. I just couldn’t make it work from an economics viewpoint. Going over the Cascades with a small plane in the wintertime has it’s hazards too. Especially after working all day and with the sun going down.
Stated somewhat differently is that the probability of weather letting me travel as needed is considerably less than with a ground based vehicle or commercial air.
“Does God hate Seattle?”
It’s near an active mountain range (over a subduction zone) with volcanos. The mountains wring out water from the atmosphere that blows in from the ocean, dumping it all over the area. It’s near the ocean and it’s built on an ancient mudslide from said volcano.
It’s a great place for a city in terms of commerce, but you build a city on such active ground between the mountains and the sea and you get the possibility of all sorts of disasters, God’s opinion notwithstanding.