The right equipment helps Caltrans keep its mountain roads open once snow season begins. At 9,000 ft., with walls of snow at 23-ft. high around you and more coming down in flakes as big as Kennedy half-dollars, you start to feel just a touch of claustrophobia. At least that’s what Mark Wright, Richard Hall, and Joe Santoro will tell you when they labor to open Route 108 over the 10,000-ft. Sonora Pass in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

The equipment fleet used is a threesome of two rotary snowplows — a Kodiak and a Schmidt — and a Dresser motor grader that works 10 hours a day without stopping, inching ahead into the untracked snow at 2 to 3 mi./hr., the big Kodiak cutting a 9-ft. box into the 6.5-ft.-deep snow, followed by the Schmidt that trims up the sides, and the Dresser that scrapes up what’s left on the roadway. This operation, to clear snow from the 40 mi. of highway between the city of Sonora and the Marine Base on the other side of the Sierra takes three to 35 days and costs around $200,000.

At the top, where the snow gets really deep, this team needs help. At 26-ft. deep, the snow is hard-packed, and while the Kodiak is capable of chewing through hard ice, the box is only 6.5-ft. tall. In past years, the maintenance district has brought in dozers with rippers to break up the ice, but now it borrows Rolbas — tough ice-fighting machines — from elsewhere. The Rolbas operate on top of the snow, cutting 3 ft. at a time, making pass after pass, until they’re down to where regular crews can finish off the job with their own equipment. It’s working in this 26-ft.-deep trough of snow that can give you the willies.

Route 108 usually closes sometime in November about 6 mi. east of Strawberry, and the snow piles up for four months. In mid-March it’s time for Bill Fields’ crew from Caltrans District 10 on the west side, and Willie Williams’ crew from District 9 to open the road. They’ll shake hands about Memorial Day.

Before that, Fields says, they’ll open the road to Kennedy Meadows in time for trout season. Later openings will make it possible for various resorts to open for business. Fields has a total of about 45 people at work on snow operations on Routes 4, 108, and 120, and when it’s snowing, they’re at it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

They rarely use salt any more to keep the roads clear — only when there are patches of ice and some sunshine to melt it. The asphalt highway itself soaks up plenty of BTUs when it’s sunny and keeps the road clear for hours, even when it is snowing steadily. Fields has a snow-fighting armada available to him, including the rotaries and graders, as well as several versions of snowplows, from those on big 5-t. rigs all the way down to the fronts of pickups.

Before the clearing operation starts, Fields flies the route in a helicopter, looking for slides, avalanches, trees down, and telltale dollops on the roadways that hide granite boulders. The snow brings down rocks big enough that a dozer can’t take them off the roadway. They have to be blasted out. After the potential trouble spots are marked, the crews go to work.

The new Kodiak tosses 5,000 t. of snow as far as 1,000 ft. up the hillside. Joe Santoro operates the $480,000 Kodiak with a single joystick. How do you know where to point the Kodiak? Santoro, Wright, and Hall pretty much know this road backward and forward, but when you’re working in 20-ft.-deep snow, things get a little dicey — you’re working above the tops of many of the trees. With the push of a lever, the Kodiak is capable of clearing the snow right down to the pavement, Santoro says, but the cutter bar at the bottom of the box is worn and he doesn’t want to produce any more wear, so he’s clearing it down to about an inch. Still, every once in a while you can see the yellow line in the middle of the roadway in your rear view mirror so you know you’re still on the road.

"You just have to use common sense," says Santoro. "Out here, the only first aid available is those two guys back there, and it’s several miles back to any help, so you keep an eye on things and you don’t try to make any sudden moves with this rig."

Among the things to keep an eye on are those large dollop-shaped lumps of snow that occasionally contain a granite boulder. The snow brings rocks and trees down onto the highway, and any one of those things will break a shear pin, designed to stop the rotor without doing damage to the rest of the machine. It’s no fun to get out and shovel the snow away from the rotor and replace a shear pin.

Behind the Kodiak comes the slightly smaller but still powerful Schmidt, tossing 3,500 t. an hour out to 165 ft. At the hands of Richard Hall, the Schmidt is used to widen out the opening in the snow and to clean up the sides. Both Hall and Santoro take quiet pride in producing a trough through the snow that contains no sign of an error, and Fields likes to rib them if he sees a gouge in the side of the trough. Hall, too, emphasizes the need for common sense in operating the Schmidt. Interestingly, you don’t have to pre-qualify to operate either of the rotaries, but Wright, who today is operating the Dresser, had to qualify to drive his piece of equipment.

It is said that Eskimos have around 50 different terms for snow, but for Fields and his crew, snow up here is pretty much just snow, except there is good snow and rotten snow — the wet, melting stuff. As you look at sides of the trough along Route 108 there are layers to it, particularly since they’ve received about a half-meter of snow over the last couple days. That’s soft and you can push a pen into it. Below that, especially if there’s been a hard frost, the snow is blue, and even a good swift kick won’t dislodge any into the roadway.

It’s toughest when the rotor does pick up something that shouldn’t be there. Then the operator has to climb down, take a shovel, and clear away the snow to find whatever the rotor has picked up. Santoro’s worst moment came when the thing in the box was a bicycle and a shirt, pants, and underwear. Only later did he breathe a sigh of relief to find that a bicyclist had tried to get over the pass in a snowstorm, abandoned his bicycle and backpack, and hoofed it back to safety at the Marine base on the other side of the Sonora Pass.