Trip to Colorado… in a Blizzard

In March of 2021, I was invited to a wedding in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although it was a quick weekend trip, I had never been to Colorado so I was excited to go to the wedding and squeeze in some sightseeing while I was there. Little did we know, an actual blizzard was coming through that same day!

My flight into Colorado started off normally, but once we were nearing Denver the pilot let us know the ground conditions were too bad to land and we had to wait for the runway to be cleared of snow and ice. After circling around for a bit, the pilot gets on the speaker system again and tells us it’s okay to land, but other planes must go first because they have lower fuel levels than we do.

I wasn’t worried or anything at this point because I still had a few hours before the wedding… or so I thought. Once we landed and I took my phone out of airplane mode and received a message that the wedding had been moved up BY 3 HOURS because of the impending storm! At this point, it was barely snowing – nothing worse than what we get in Indiana. So I missed the wedding, but made it in time for the reception and the white ground cover was a gorgeous backdrop.

After the wedding, we stayed the night in Colorado Springs and then woke up the next morning with the intent of doing a little hike before heading out. My friend is INSANE and drove 20+ hours to Colorado, so I was going to help drive back to Indiana. We hiked a little bit of the Barr Trail in Manitou Springs and then decided to hit the road. This is when our adventure took a turn!

In Colorado, when bad weather is coming through, they close the roads with these metal bars so motorists won’t get trapped out on the highway or put their lives at risk driving in hazardous conditions. After we saw roads were starting to close, we hopped on maps.cotrip.org and realized nearly all the roads out of Colorado were closed or closing. Then the blizzard hit. We were stuck on the highway for a few hours because an abandoned vehicle was blocking an exit. With the wind, it was nearly a complete whiteout! At one point, one of the other motorists said we might have to stay in our vehicles overnight.

Finally, we were able to start driving again, get to a hotel, raid their little market (every food place was closed by that point), and wait out the storm. When we woke up, the storm had passed, the roads were being cleared, and we were on our way back to the Midwest. If anyone is ever interested in going to Colorado from Indiana, I would definitely recommend flying versus driving; it is a very long and boring drive through Kansas (sorry if you live there!), and for some reason there are benches on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.

Despite being stuck on the highway for hours, and getting delayed an extra day, Colorado was still beautiful and I absolutely plan on visiting again… but probably when the weather is a little nicer.

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