this is an email foward to me so here it is with the pics
As you all know, eastern Colorado and western Kansas has been hit hard
by
holiday season snow storms. All of a sudden, snow plows started to
appear
here and there, and that always gets us going. Early New Year’s Day,
Mike
Danneman, John Charles and I headed east in John’s big diesel truck. We
only
had an approximate idea where UP’s Cheyenne rotary was working (on the
KP,
UP’s Limon Sub), but we didn’t know how we could get there. The
interstate
was the only road officially open and we needed so use some state
highways
to see the plow. We drove to Goodland, Kansas, and headed south on
Kansas
27, which was marked closed. We kept going for 30 miles until we
reached
Sharon Springs, a UP crew change point. They had just gotten 32 inches
of
snow and all roads into town were officially closed. The town was a
mess
with huge drifts in the middle of the streets. (We learned that closed
highways do not necessarily mean impassible highways.)
From Sharon Springs, we headed west on US 40, which was also closed,
and met
the rotary about noon just east of the Kansas-Colorado border at
Weskan,
Kansas. We chased it until dark and left it west of Wallace, Kansas.
The UP
rotary was going to Oakley, Kansas, where it would quit and head back
west.
All of this was to take place at night, so we drove back to Goodland
for the
night. We had heard that the Kyle would be running wedge plow out of
Goodland the next morning so we thought we’d try for that. Early
yesterday,
Jan 2, we were waiting for something to happen at Goodland when we
learned
that the plow was actually westbound coming out of Colby, Kansas, about
30
miles east. We hightailed it east and met the plow just west of Colby
and
followed it west to Go