Wandering with Sam
Winter in the Urban Northwest
Jan 9, 2006, 22:07

Oregon Encased in Ice

After experiencing a wintry December in Idaho's Panhandle with cross country skiing in my yard and frozen water pipes, I reflected back on my winters while living on the other side of the Cascades, where the "urban" Northwest is located.

Generally winter over there amounts to grey drizzly skies, early sunsets (if we see the sun at all), and waterlogged freeways filled with bright red brakelights. And occasionally we were treated to spectacular "Pacific Northwest" days with beautiful sunsets and spectacular views of snow covered mountains like the Olympics or Mount Hood, only partially hidden by a brand-new highrise condo. However, occasionally real winter strikes balmy Latteland along the I-5 corridor, which effectly paralyzes the entire region. Most people scoff at how desperate the situation gets after a dusting of two or three inches of snow, but this really does cause problems. And more than six inches of snow can be catastrophic.

The first two weeks of January, 2004 brought real winter to the Willamette Valley in Western Oregon, an exceptional experience for a region that is often treated to six months of grey skies and intermittent rain with lows in the forties. Portland practically shut down when faced with about six inches of snow. The news stations became round-the-clock crisis centers and radio DJ’s droned on and on about school closures, often before the snow had even dusted the area.

High amounts of traffic led to inevitable spinouts, fender-benders and ditched vehicles, although I would have to say that Portland has a much better grip on Jack Frost than a certain self proclaimed world class city to the north (we won’t mention any names here). I didn’t see throngs of taxi cabs abandoned alongside the freeway near the airport, I did not hear of suburbanite workers stranded downtown, and I did not see the twisted frames of spun out articulated buses, such as what I have seen in that unmentionable city on the Sound after a mere two inches of snow… Nevertheless, normal business was suspended for about four days when snow and ice impacted the Willamette Valley.

The first round of snow came on New Year’s Day with four to eight inches covering much of the metropolitan area. This was somewhat unexpected, but was a joy for late rising and hung over partiers who had the day off from work. I spent a couple hours cross-country skiing around my neighborhood until the snow shifted to a thawing rain that afternoon. Later that night, the slush became solid ice when an arctic cold spell with temperatures in the low teens moved into the area.

After a few days of this cold and windy arctic air mass, the meteorologists began predicting the arrival of a warm Pacific air mass in the next couple days. According to these predictions, snow was supposed to fall for about 12 to 24 hours when the warm air mass collided with the artic front, and then it would cause it to shift to rain and all the snow would disappear. However, they also warned that the snow could possibly change to a dangerous freezing rain that would cover streets, sidewalks, trees and power lines with an icy glaze.

This weather pattern essentially happened as predicted, except it understated the duration of the snowy weather. Instead of a 12 hour taste of winter followed by an aggressive thaw by afternoon the next day, the snow and ice lingered for four days before it finally melted.

Burnside and the "Big Pink"

The snow arrived in Portland at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning and steadily fell, burying the cold and icy sidewalks almost immediately. Three inches of dry sugary snow had accumulated by morning when I was off to work. I briefly considered staying home and ignoring my job and allowing someone else to go all the way out to Hillsboro to fill in for me, but couldn’t bring myself to do that. So I stepped out of my apartment building into the swirling snow and walked to the MAX light rail station by PGE stadium near downtown Portland. A cluster of people was already standing there, bundled up for arctic weather (and it was quite cold that morning, perhaps 15 degrees with a considerable wind chill). My ears were burning because I did not have a hat.

After 20 minutes of waiting, a quite full train with fogged windows arrived and we scrambled on board. A train seemed to be the ideal way to get to work on snowy days, because they seemed less apt to get stuck in the snow and stood virtually no chance at spinning out. This was too good to be true, because the the light rail service was suspended by that afternoon because ice on the overhead power lines had cut off its source of power. This train had enough trouble grabbing the rails as it climbed the hill from Goose Hollow to the tunnel underneath Washington Park. I knew that getting out to push was not really an option.

Once I arrived at my place of employment, a very large computer processor manufacturer in Hillsboro, I found that I probably could have stayed home, since most of our air cargo shipments were likely to remain in Portland because the airport was closed and trucks weren’t running to Seattle or Vancouver. Only half of my co-workers even came in, and most of those only worked a half-day because they were eager to head home before the freezing rain started. I don’t mean to belittle people who are apprehensive about risking life and limb to just show up at work, but often snowy days can be quite effective at revealing the truly dedicated (or perhaps the truly stupid).

Basically driving on snowy and icy roads in Portland is considered by most people to be exceptionally hazardous and something you just don't do, even though a comparable amount of snow in places like Idaho or Montana has an almost neglibible impact on people getting around.

Evening Rush Hour on I-405 North

Most transportation services were thoroughly disrupted, including just about every highway out of town except Interstate 5 to the north. I-5 was closed south of Eugene and was a solid sheet of ice through the Willamette Valley. Most of the highways across the Cascades were closed, and a Wal-Mart parking lot in Hood River became a massive campsite for long haul truckers stranded because I-84 was closed at the Columbia River Gorge for three days. Almost all of the flights through Portland were cancelled, save for an inbound Hawaiian Airlines flight, which wasn’t allowed to take off again. I felt for that Hawaiian crew if they ended up being stranded in Portland because the shift from Honolulu’s balmy 80 degree evenings to Portland's 20 degree ice storms would be a bit too dramatic for me! The only transportation success stories seemed to be Trimet buses, the Postal Service, UPS, and the railroads, although Amtrak’s trains were running an hour or so behind schedule.

The morning DJ’s on the radio spent all of their morning talk shows reading off school status lists. In fact, they often had to go through it twice, because first they announced which schools were running late, and by the time they got through this exhaustive list, they received an update that they had just decided to cancel classses. Meanwhile, parks and hilly streets became sledding areas and snowball battlefields as Portland began to resemble a more traditional northern American city during the holidays.

Only a handful of businesses remained open, and most of these were pubs and coffee shops along streets like Northwest Twenty-Third Avenue, and they were probably only open because many of their customers and employees lived within walking distance. I do not know how people coped with the weather in the suburbs, but in an urban neighborhood like Northwest Portland the streets were filled with people walking, skiing, leading dogs, and playing in the snow. Work did get done, but it was mostly tele-commuters with laptops and cellphones using the local Starbucks as their office while the ice accumulated outside.

Driving in a Winter Wonderland.

Actually, a few people were driving around town without too many problems except when they got stuck while parking or after turning down an unplowed street (probably no one had studded tires). Most often people walking on the street ignored the spinning tires of these hapless victims of the snow, perhaps a bit too callously. A few times I unclipped my skis and helped push people up a short hill or back into the plowed street, but after two or three efforts at helping out drivers in distress, I decided that they could be more considerate to the people around them by not getting stuck in the first place!

I skied downtown at about 4 p.m. when typically the afternoon commute would be underway. However, that day, Interstate 405 was almost totally devoid of cars, the Pioneer Place Mall was closed, and the downtown streets eerily resembled a deserted ruin in a futuristic nuclear winter with the closed up stores and the stalled MAX trains lined up along the tracks. I skied through Pioneer Square, the central brick plaza that has been billed as Portland’s “living room”. Even though I was about the only person in the square, a uniformed security officer ran out of her building to inform me that I had broken a city ordinance by skiing there. Apparently skateboarding, bicycling, and skiing in Pioneer Square was absolutely forbidden, because of safety concerns. I wondered how often they had to enforce the skiing part of this rule!

The final phase of Portland’s wintry ordeal of 2004 was the freezing rain, a two day long icy rain that coated trees, cars, streets, and sidewalks with an inch thick glaze of ice. This was especially dangerous for driving, and was quite treacherous even for walking, as I found when I slipped all over the sidewalk as I carefully inched my way down to the local coffee shop for my morning beverage. The worst of the ice storm was south of Portland; the steps in front of the Capitol Building in Salem were literally buried underneath a smooth ramp of several inches of ice.

The Weekend Thaw

Finally, the thaw came the following weekend, and the snow gradually receded until only the highest mountains of plowed snow in parking lots remained. Portland once again became its normal waterlogged self for the remainder of the winter. And for the next few days the freeways, malls, theaters, and MAX trains were jammed with desperate families that had just been granted a pardon from a long dreary spell of house arrest in the car dependent suburbs.

Over the next several days, all discussion was about the snow: how difficult it was to park, how buses were sliding sideways on their routes, and how ridiculous it was that the city shut down after only six inches of snow. Most people said that they were fully confident in their ability to drive in the snow, but they didn’t trust idiot following them. This smug attitude is understandable, but rather laughable, since most everyone in Portland is from somewhere else, and many are from Midwestern or mountain states that experienced quite severe winters. Most of us thought that this storm was nothing; we’ve seen it so much worse in Reno, Spokane or Racine. So why is it that this city of virtually all Midwesterners shuts down so thoroughly after a mild snowstorm?

Although tempting, I don’t think we can blame all of this on the Californians, even though we blame them for just about everything else. Especially since one of the cars I helped push out of deep snow had Wisconsin license plates on it.

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