Subes for life!

News flash for you city dwellers: it gets cold in the mountains in winter. This post is too late for a, “Winter is coming,” warning, and that line is overused anyway so I won’t use it here. [Hmmm, OK, well just that once, then.]

Tioga Pass closed temporarily* last week and I decided to hang at the bottom and wait for the reopen so I could head back into the Valley. But — surprise! — a huge storm rolled through over the weekend. And man, what a rager it was. The poor Subes4Life and the Subes4Lifer it sheltered were battered by the most fiercesome winds and bursts of hail that one could imagine. So bad, in fact, that I wondered if the car would roll over.**

I don’t know the physics involved in flipping a car, but it seemed like a possibility so I got up to move somewhere more sheltered. And lo and behold my shoes were gone. Again! This time there was no mystery meth-head messing with my stuff. Spoiler alert: it was the wind!

I grabbed a flashlight and wandered around in bare feet for a few minutes, and found one shoe about 20′ away in the scrub brush. And then, the other a few more feet into the bushes. As I was searching a rig drove up to the nearby gas station / restaurant to look around, and then rolled slowly past me to see what was up with the deranged guy in the shrubbery at two in the morning. I’m not sure if it was a ranger, a sheriff, or the owner of the Mobil station (Hi, Denise!), but it was kinda cool they came over to make sure life was good for the dirtbag living in their back yard.

I waved, clicked off my light, got my shoes on, and moved the car behind a retaining wall. And finally at about 0300 was able to get some sleep. The car was still rockin’-and-rollin’ but the wind was tamed for the morning.

Whew!

Winter is here.

*And yes, by “temporary” they meant “for the season” since the storm was worse than expected.

**Not sure if it’s even possible. Leaving this as a point of research for future readers.