No roads open in or out.
That was the situation facing the Wood River Valley last week onThursday as a fast-moving winter storm packing heavy winds and falling snow convinced officials with the Idaho Transportation Department to temporarily close state Highway 75 from both the north and south, and U.S. Highway 20 from the east and west.
For a short period of time, this meant the valley was effectively shut off from the rest of the outside world, at least by any reliable means of ground transportation. To enforce the highway closures, a police patrol car was reportedly stationed at the south end of Bellevue.
Statewide, highway officials closed numerous other stretches of highway due to the severe weather conditions.
Thankfully, the valley's near complete separation from the outside world didn't last for long. Sometime after nightfall late Thursday evening road crews successfully reopened Highway 75 heading south to Shoshone and Twin Falls.
But by Friday morning, ITD road crews had still only opened that one route in or out of the valley.
Still shut down were all or parts of 13 different highways in the state because of the hazardous conditions. Subsequently, ITD officials and the Idaho State Police encouraged motorists to avoid travel on highways that had received continual snowfall and were still susceptible to high winds, blowing snow and reduced visibility.
Local road closures remaining in effect on Friday were those for Highway 75 heading north from Ketchum over Galena Summit and Highway 20 heading west from the Timmerman Junction to Fairfield and Mountain Home and east to Carey and Arco. Other Idaho closure covered all or portions of U.S. Highways 12, 26, 89 and 95 and state highways 21, 32, 33, 34, 36, 46 and 51.
Many local residents and businesses were undoubtedly impacted by the highway closures in one way or another.
One of these was the Sun Valley Co., which ended up reserving more than 30 of its guest rooms Thursday night for employees unable to take their normal bus ride home to Twin Falls and other locations in the Magic Valley. Many of those rooms were occupied by more than one employee, Sun Valley's director of sales and marketing Jack Sibbach said Tuesday.
Sibbach said the exceptional highway conditions also led to a number of no shows on Thursday.
"There were quite a few," he said.
Sibbach said a few bus loads with Sun Valley guests who were rerouted to the airport in Twin Falls did eventually arrive in the valley late Thursday night.
He said a group of German tourism wholesalers who were on their way to Sun Valley for a familiarization tour were caught in Arco around noon on Thursday when the highways began closing. He said the group's plans included dinner, a tour of the resort and several ski runs on Bald Mountain.
Instead, they didn't arrive in Sun Valley until Friday night at 7 p.m., Sibbach said. Because of the late arrival, they missed their skiing jaunt, but were able to have dinner and briefly tour the area before leaving Saturday morning at 10 a.m., he said.
Sibbach said while wintry highway conditions like last week's are rare, they do happen every few years.
"Accessibility is always an issue here," he said.
A lack of accessibility was apparently also an issue at Magic Reservoir south of the valley on Thursday. The winter storm reportedly left the road to West Magic full of drifting snow, which in turn left a handful of residents stranded at their isolated cabins.
Webb Landscape employee Donna McMillan of Twin Falls was among five or six company employees caught in the valley by the bad weather Thursday night.
McMillan said she and several other Webb Landscape employees left work around 1:30 p.m. Thursday, but were stopped by a highway patrol officer stationed at the Timmerman Junction. She said they waited at the junction for 3.5 hours, before being told the route through Carey and then south to Shoshone was open.
She said once they arrived in Carey, ITD officials told them that route wasn't open either.
McMillan said that after waiting in Carey for several hours, they returned to Bellevue to see if they could find a hotel room for the night.
They arrived just in the nick of time.
"There was one room left in the valley. It was at Highcountry Hotel in Bellevue," she said.
McMillan said they were finally able to drive home around 1:30 p.m. on Friday. She said that while the roads were still treacherous, they weren't about to wait any longer.
"We thought one night of being stranded was enough," she said.
Thursday's bad weather also led to at least one traffic accident in the valley. Late in the day, emergency crews were called out to an accident between a delivery truck and a car.
West of the valley in neighboring Camas County, Fairfield schools kept children in school well into Thursday evening due to the whiteout conditions and drifting snow that paralyzed the windswept Camas Prairie.
On Tuesday, only U.S. Highway 12 over Lolo Pass and along the Lochsa River corridor southwest of Missoula, Mont., remained closed.
In a news release last week, the ITD said many of the routes closed on Thursday and Friday have been intermittently closed during the previous two weeks because of blowing and drifting snow. They warned motorists that more of the same could occur this winter.
"Closures and openings can occur with little advance notice because of rapidly changing conditions," the ITD said.
The main road into the residential area of West Magic Reservoir, south of Bellevue, was shut off Thursday morning after drifting snow from last week?s winter storm made plowing it a challenge. The storm also kept many local workers from returning home to places like Twin Falls and kept some tourists from reaching Sun Valley Resort.
Photo by Willy Cook
