"How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?"
The answer, my friend, according to Mr. Bob Dylan, is always "blowin' in the wind."
The pages of OverdriveOnline.com feature all sorts of crazy traffic happenings across the nation's highways and byways, callouts about the country's worst interstates, bridges and freight bottlenecks. Yet at once, from our perch behind laptops, it can be hard to get to the on-the-ground reality.
The U.S. interstate system represents one of the true wonders of the modern world, a great engine that allows diesels to ferry crucial supplies like blood cells of the body carry needed oxygen. As such, it's truly for truck operators to say what real trucking is, what real experiences on the road are, and just exactly how many roads must one haul down before we can call him a true trucker.
Given headlines in recent years, I-80 out in Wyoming strikes me as, perhaps, the craziest, wildest, most unpredictable major interstate in the country. Sure, I-95 has its traffic. Vermont's Smuggler's Notch snatches up a few trucks a season, but that's not even close to an interstate. I-75 gets terrorized by the Ice Pick Bandit. I-40 might be "rougher than a corncob" out in Arizona, but I-80 seems to hold a surprise for all seasons.
Take the Wyoming "Winter from Hell" in 2023 when Overdrive contributor Long Haul Paul got a personal road shutdown experience along the route. Road crews battled a dozen or so feet of snow drifting in and out of the interstate, burying police cars and trucks almost as fast as they could clear a lane. Sometimes crews worked around the clock to open the highway for just an hour.
This Summer, then, that exact same stretch of I-80 sees massive superloads for a windfarm project bringing traffic to a crawl. Further West on I-80, then, a Tesla Semi battery fire closed the the road in California for 16 hours, with 1,000-degree blazes so hot even aircraft could not fly overhead for hours.
Of course it's not all bad on I-80. Look for the world's largest truck stop in Iowa, likewise the Walcott Jamboree.
But is that enough to rank as the wildest frontier in trucking? Is there something we're missing from behind the computer screen?
Weigh in with this poll below. What's your pick for the wildest stretch of interstate in the country? One about which you might say, "you haven't done real OTR trucking until you've done this." We'll be sure not to leave you blowin' in the wind, as the old song says.
