Storms close highway and Sisters schools

A series of snow-laden storms brought travel through Sisters to a standstill over the weekend and gave local students and teachers a day off on Monday, February 8.

Eastbound travelers inundated local stores on Saturday, hunting for tire chains to help them make it over the Santiam Pass.

"We sold more chains on Saturday than we had all month," said Jeff Taylor of Sisters' Les Schwab tire store. "It's been a scramble to keep things in stock."

According to Oregon Department of Transportation dispatcher Cheryl Hughes, a roadblock went up on Highway 20 at the Jack Lake turn-off at about 4 p.m. Sunday. It stayed up for about seven hours, forcing eastbound travelers to turn around and come back to Sisters, where the lodging business boomed overnight.

"We had an increase in business of about two-thirds," Comfort Inn manager Tom Anderson reported. "From about 4 p.m. till about 8:30 to 9 p.m. there was a steady stream of people coming in."

He said proprieters of local motels and bed-and-breakfasts spent a lot of time on the phone trying to locate rooms for frustrated travelers. According to Anderson, much of their frustration was caused by a lack of warnings and updates about the closure.

"There was a lot of complaining about the lack of information and the sharing of information," Anderson said.

But at least the stranded travelers didn't have to face profiteering lodgers.

"Nobody I know of did anything with their rates to take advantage of the people who were stuck," Anderson said.

The confused situation may have been due in part to the unusual scale of the closure.

Hughes said that in 14 years with ODOT she doesn't recall such a complete storm-related closure.

"You'll have conditional closures, but nothing like this," she said. "It just avalanched."

Hughes said that local ODOT crews went up the mountain with snowblowers in order to clear multiple slides. Their efforts were complicated by 60-mile-per-hour winds on the pass.

The heavy snows and slick roads caused school district officials to call off classes for Monday, February 8. The day off seemed unnecessary as the sun made an effort to break through in the late morning hours, but by early afternoon Sisters was socked in again, with fresh snow piling in the streets and accumulating on recently shoveled sidewalks.