Keeping U.S. 40 open over the Pass, thought the Superintendent, was just one crisis after another. Yesterday it had been the jam at Windy Point, and tomorrow it would be something else, but today it was wind. Not so much snow was falling; the clouds were thinner; little scraps of blue sky showed through. The Superintendent could feel some shift in the weather, although he could not figure out just what was happening. But the end of the storm would come with a sharply rising barometer and a wind-shift into the north, or northwest at least. And now his barometer stayed low, and the wind had veered only from south to west.

This wind had been growing stronger all morning. By noon it was a gale. The rotaries had been throwing snow over the windrows since Sunday, and now the wind seemed to pick up all this snow on the windward side, and blow it back. The snow-walls on both sides of the roadway were six, or eight, or ten feet high by now. Across the top the wind swept unhindered, but within the shelter of the walls it swirled and eddied and dropped the snow which it was blowing along. From the crest of the windward side the snow blew out sometimes until it looked like a snow-banner from a mountain peak, and at the foot of this wall the drifts built out so fast that you could stand and watch them grow. A rotary would go through leaving a clean track behind it, and before the rotary was out of sight, six inches of snow might have drifted across the road.

So far during the storm the plows had kept a two-lane highway open, but now the snow blew in faster than the rotaries could move along to throw it out, and after each push-plow the cleared passageway was narrower than it had been the time before. By eleven in the morning the Superintendent realized that he was going to have a real struggle to keep the road open at all. He mapped out his campaign.

He gave orders. At the Lake and at Baxter his men swung the long steel gates across the highway, and neither truck nor car went through without chains on. At Baxter the drivers protested in plenty; Baxter was sheltered in a thick pine forest, and the wind did not seem strong; not much snow was falling. People never realized that conditions higher up might be different, and might have grown worse while conditions lower down were growing better. But all their protesting made no difference; they went ahead with chains, or not at all.