The Oregon Department of Transportation in 2017 purchased oversize plows that can clear both 12-foot lanes of a freeway simultaneously for use in Northeast Oregon. Snowplows used on smaller highways don't have this advantage. Plow drivers faced an unprecedented whiteout during a blizzard that bombarded the Blue Mountains between Baker City and Prairie City the morning of Friday, Feb. 26, 2021.

BAKER CITY — Driving a snowplow is a daunting task, particularly when you can’t see the plow.

The Oregon Department of Transportation’s plow drivers are of course accustomed to nasty snowstorms. But even they were “shaken up,” as one driver put it, by the ferocity of the blizzard that bombarded the Blue Mountains between Baker City and Prairie City the morning of Friday, Feb. 26.

“We’re used to the heavy snowfall,” said Toby Gangler, the coordinator at ODOT’s maintenance station at Austin Junction in Grant County.

That station is near the junction of Highways 26 and 7, about 50 miles southwest of Baker City.

But it was the gusting wind that made the storm so noteworthy.

“It was unlike anything we’ve seen,” Gangler said.

Gangler said John Burke, a plow driver who’s in his 25th winter working the storm-prone Blue Mountains, told him he could remember only one storm during his career comparable to the recent tempest.

For about two hours starting around 7:30 a.m. that day, the section of Highway 7 from Austin Junction to Sumpter Valley was hit by a blizzard that reduced visibility to, well, basically zero, Gangler said.

Burke radioed in an estimate of “maybe 20 feet.”

Gangler, who later went out in another plow to help Burke, said, “You couldn’t see the plow at the front of your truck.”

Gangler’s crew is responsible for about half of Highway 7 — from Austin Junction to the Sumpter Valley Railroad crossing. Often the worst sections are the two mountain passes, Larch Summit near Sumpter Valley and Tipton Summit about 8 miles from Austin Junction.

But during Friday’s blizzard the storm was most fierce in Whitney Valley, about 33 miles southwest of Baker City, Gangler said.

On that stretch, where the highway runs between the meadows along the North Fork of Burnt River and Camp Creek, the wind and snow created a whiteout — a situation where the lack of visual references means drivers are, almost literally, flying blind.

Conditions were similarly atrocious from Whitney Valley to around Larch Summit, a distance of about 5 miles, Gangler said.

At times that morning, Gangler said, the wind was whipping the light, powdery snow to the point the plows were less effective than usual because some of the snow their blades pushed along ended up back on the road.

“We probably shouldn’t have been out there,” he said of the snowplow drivers. “Much less the traveling public.”

The conditions were so dangerous that ODOT issued a public notice urging drivers to avoid Highway 7 as well as Highways 245 (Dooley Mountain) and 26.

Gangler said the wind made it difficult to estimate how much snow actually fell during the storm, which in places continued into Saturday morning, Feb. 27.

“We might have had a foot in one place and 5 feet in another,” he said.