The Clayton Blizzard of 2006

by Michael J. Perullo

Just after Christmas 2006, I decided to drive my 1990 Nissan Stanza from Atlanta to Silver Cliff, Colorado to stay in my cabin over New Years’ Eve. What a trip this turned out to be! I love to travel by car or Jeep, and this road trip was to be my 169th since 1991 when I first moved to Atlanta. Usually, I make an overnight stop between Georgia and Colorado in Yukon, Oklahoma, staying in a cheap motel and having some local Mexican food after this first 871 mile leg of the journey I’ve made many times.

I left Yukon early that morning after fitful sleep due to too much Mexican food and noisy thunder from a big rainstorm. At 4:04 a.m. it was 53 degrees when I left the Green Carpet Inn and headed west on I-40 to make the familiar drive from there through Elk City, Oklahoma. The weather was windy, rainy and rough! Things turned from bad to worse in the Texas panhandle. Passing through Pampa, Dumas and Dalhart, the sky was staying black as night even though it was now past a sunrise that no one in Texas saw that morning. Hard rain (lightning in December?!) in Dumas turned to sleet by Dalhart, and beyond that on Highway 87 it was snowing hard.

Now the Stanza isn’t exactly your ideal all-weather vehicle, but it was front wheel drive, and that proved essential as I made for the New Mexico border and Highway 64 into Clayton. People who have traveled this way on a sunny day swear the sky changes color once you cross over into New Mexico, and I have seen this deep blue. On December 29, 2006, there was no sky to be seen, only white snow, and it was getting deep on the road. Proceeding along down in second gear, the windshield heavily caked with frozen sleet, I had just ten miles to make it to Clayton.

Rolling into Clayton, I could see that the wide open familiar town was now buried under a wintry blanket of heavy snow. At Love’s gas station, I learned that roads north, west, and east were already closed, and that Highway 64 to the south was about to be closed. This meant that my 25th road trip through New Mexico was about to end with at least a night in Clayton. It was 9:54 a.m., and I had made it 348 miles that morning, 200 miles short of my cabin. Now the dash was on to find a motel room amongst the other stranded folks.

Luckily I snatched the last room at the Clayton Motel at the west edge of town on Highway 54. I pulled into its driveway so quickly that I could not see how deep the snow was there and was promptly buried up to my axles. Did I mention the Stanza was white? This required an hour of digging, after which I checked into my room where I would spend two nights, and very luckily, not eight or ten nights.

After visiting my room and turning on the heat, I helped the lady who owned the motel shovel a path to her laundry room to get at some soft drinks she had stored there. Then I drove back down to Dairy Queen to eat lunch and see what was happening. After that, it occurred to me with everything closing, I probably should pick up a tuna sub at Subway to eat that night in my room. Little did I know that the room would never get higher than 59 degrees. That night was going to be a TV night, and I used a coat hanger to stuff a towel along the one-inch gap in the motel window that was painted open sometime before the Arab oil embargo. There was plenty in the news as James Brown just passed away, and Saddam was also about to pass away.

The next day there was no new information; all roads were still closed. Later in the afternoon on the 30th the snow stopped, and I walked a mile or so up to the Rancher’s Market to see what they had for groceries. I bought some delicious packaged victuals and headed back to the room. That night there was a giant party scene in the old bar of the Eklund Hotel. There were people hooting and hollering and drinking beer and whisky; you would have thought someone just made a gold strike.

On the morning of December 31 I began to get dismayed that New Years’ Eve was going to be spent in Clayton; certainly the crowd at the Eklund would be fun, but I wanted to be up at Poag Mahone’s in Westcliffe, Colorado. At noon, my Blueberry rang, and it was my buddy Mike from Westcliffe asking where I was. I explained that Highway 64 out of town was blocked by fourteen-foot drifts for miles, and I was stuck. Mike said he would ask his buddy Bob to fly down and pick me up in his 1976 Mooney four-seater! Wow, I thought! I may be the only person to leave Union County, New Mexico for more than a week. I was.

A plan was hatched. I called over to the Clayton Airport to check on the runway. The airport was officially listed as closed. The runways were relatively clear but the taxiways near the terminal had ten foot drifts. The airport manager would allow Bob’s plane to land and take off on the same runway. I packed everything I could into plastic bags and headed to the airport through snow drifts and unplowed streets. I got stuck three times in four miles on the way to the airport, having to be winched out twice. Finally making it to the terminal, the manager had me park the Stanza in an open field, windblown with almost no snow. It was now about four in the afternoon of New Years’ Eve, and the sky was clear New Mexico blue.

Bob and Mike were en route from Pueblo and at 4:53 p.m. I saw their plane making a big turn to approach the Clayton runway. The plane was on the ground at 4:58 p.m. and the airport manager’s brother drove me out to meet the plane in his pickup truck accompanied by his Alaskan Husky who drooled all over my notebook computer. Bob shut the engine down and we loaded in about four minutes. By 5:05 p.m., we were losing daylight and were on our way to Pueblo.

Getting skyward, I could see first hand that Highway 64 was obliterated by drifting snow. By 6:30 we were on the ground in Pueblo. From there we drove up to Silver Cliff, and I was at my cabin at 9 p.m. on New Years’ Eve. I could not believe it. A couple of hours later I was down at the pub with all of the area revelers for the big hand and the little hand striking twelve. At 11:40 p.m. it did strike twelve on the big wall clock and Auld Lang Syne was sung. Since Bob owned that pub back then, we did it all over again at midnight! Ringing in 2007 twice was a great way to cap my Stanza travel adventure!

Michael Perullo writes from Silver Cliff where he lives in a cabin on the corner of two plowed streets.