When Interstate 80 was shut down across southern Wyoming by a sudden spring snowstorm this past week, Candice Hopper of Marsing, Idaho, was worried about her 65-year-old father, Marshall.
He was on his way home to Mississippi when he got caught in the storm, stuck in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard.
“He comes out here once a year to play music,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “He got caught 8 miles outside of Rawlins around 3:45 a.m. that morning.”
With snow up to the doors of the van he’d rented for the trip, Hopper said there was nothing her dad could do but wait it out. And wait he did, along with hundreds of other motorists and commercial truck drivers.
“He didn’t start moving until 6:30 p.m.,” she said.
So, what did he do stuck in a van on I-80 for 15 hours?
“He spent most of his time just trying to rest in between texts and phone calls checking on him,” Hopper said. “He got in and out to stretch his legs, but mostly just sat.”
With hundreds of people stuck for hours — some overnight — on a Wyoming highway during a winter storm with whatever gas is in the tank and little or no food or water is a worst-case scenario.
Work, Watch, Help
Trucker Zade Cyr was heading home to Rawlins when he got stuck "somewhere near the Continental Divide" on I-80 around 9 a.m. that morning.
He was there for 11 hours by the time the highway was clear enough for traffic to start crawling on.
“That’s never happened to me before,” he said.
Cyr had enough food and water to keep him going, even offering some to anyone who could find his semitrailer in the near whiteout conditions.
Beyond that, he kept himself occupied with some housekeeping, or “cab-keeping.”
“When truckers get stuck, we generally watch TV, sleep, talk on the phone, work on our trucks, and clean our sleepers,” he said. “I spent most of my wait relaxing, watching videos, and talking on my phone.”
It wasn’t all rest and relaxation.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do in a snowstorm, Cyr decided it was a good time to put chains on his drive tires to ensure he could keep going once traffic resumed.
Cyr also got to channel his inner good Samaritan energy to help other drivers less accustomed to long waits in bad weather in Wyoming.
“I helped a Ukrainian man put chains on when I was done with mine,” he said.
Rawlins resident Marianne Nelson usually has a 10-minute commute to her job at the Wyoming State Penitentiary. By 11 a.m. that day, she had been stuck for nearly six hours and tried to arrange some relief.
“I have less than a quarter of a tank of gas,” she told Cowboy State Daily that morning. “I'm trying to get permission from the Wyoming Highway Patrol for my son to come up on his snowmobile.”
That request was denied, as it would have added an extra element of chaos to an already complicated response to a serious situation.
Carbon County In Chaos
Transportation across southern Wyoming was shut down for most of May 18 due to an influx of heavy, wet snow. As much as 30 inches was recorded in the Snowy Range in a 36-hour period.
“My dad said one minute it was lightly snowing, and the next it was a full-on blizzard,” Hopper said.
Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day said as much as 2 inches of snow was falling every hour at the peak of the snowstorm. That brought much-needed moisture, but it was a serious hindrance for hundreds of people on and off I-80.
Nobody got it worse than Rawlins and central Carbon County.
In addition to several inches of snow, a damaged transmission line caused an extended power outage that took over 24 hours to restore.
The power outage directly impacted the Wyoming Department of Transportation’s (WYDOT) response to the snowstorm. With no power, the plow trucks stationed in Rawlins couldn’t refuel.
Long-haul trucker Terry Wrzesinski, who spent much of Monday "dead stopped somewhere between Rawlins and Wamsutter,” described it as “bloody apocalyptic.”
Help Please
As the hours dragged on, Hopper was worried about how her father was handling the unexpected ordeal.
He’s no stranger to snow, having lived in Idaho before moving to Mississippi, but being trapped in a vehicle on I-80 was a different matter.
“I actually had asked him how he managed to get caught in that, because we're pretty religious about checking the weather and picking our routes,” she said. “He told me that he recalled checking the weather and hadn't seen anything that had him concerned.”
Hopper said her dad was getting low on fuel and was concerned about having enough water. She decided to call the Wyoming Highway Patrol to ask for a wellness check.
“The gals that answered the phone were very nice, but they said they were super overwhelmed with all the crashes and call-ins,” she said. “They didn't have an ETA for his section.”
Hopper asked if there was a way to coordinate a supply drop to her father via snowmobile. She was told that it “wasn’t an option.”
“They were only allowing tow trucks on the highway,” she said. “They gave me numbers for about six different places that might be able to help him. I only got to speak with one of them. The rest were unavailable, or I just couldn’t get through.”
Finally, Hopper turned to the Facebook group Wyoming Road and Weather Conditions Reports & Updates. It was the go-to source for on-the-ground updates during the snowstorm shutdown, with nearly a million hits on May 18 alone.
“My dad is stuck on eastbound I-80,” she wrote. “I’m asking how I can help my dad specifically. He is basically out of fuel, and almost out of water, and still no ETA when they will be able to get that section clear.”
For Hopper, it was about more than fuel and water. She was concerned about her dad’s health.
“He does have some health issues, and one of those has to do with his heart,” she said. “I'm concerned anytime anybody's stuck on the side of the road with any kind of medical condition, so I was concerned about getting him taken care of while he was stuck.”
The response was immediate and heartwarming.
“So many people started reaching out to me personally,” she said. “Truck drivers wanted descriptions of him, his vehicle and where he was stuck. A lot of people were trying to get resources together.”
Thankfully, one of those people was the trucker parked right in front of her dad. He offered whatever assistance her father was willing to accept.
“Everyone was very kind,” she said.
Chatter To A Minimum
Anyone who’s seen a trucker-inspired movie or TV show, or listened to the 1975 C.W. McCall classic “Convoy,” is familiar with the trucking trope of the citizens band (CB) radio.
It’s how truckers have communicated with each other while rockin’ through the night.
That may be the perception, but it’s not the reality in 2026. Cyr said CB radios have fallen out of favor over the years.
“CB radios should be required by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, but there’s not a lot of use during normal operations anymore,” he said. “But you can’t stop them from talking when there’s a wreck, delay, or winter storm.”
Cyr said his top priority was keeping his truck running. Shutting off his engine could make the situation worse.
Cyr wanted to make sure he could get moving as soon as WYDOT got the roads clear enough for traffic to resume. That meant keeping his truck running the entire time, or at least as long as he had fuel to keep it running.
“In the winter, shutting down your truck is a bad idea,” he said. “Generally speaking, anytime I’m covered in ice, my truck stays running except when I’m at the yard in Rawlins. Gel up, freeze def, lock your brakes down.”
Come Together
After multiple hours and dozens of calls, Hopper finally got confirmation that the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office had reached her father.
He was fine and already watching the front-loaders clearing snow in the distance.
“The deputies helped him dig out his van,” she said. “Everyone banded together at the end, digging their cars out of the snow so they’d be ready when the roads got cleared.
By 6:30 p.m., Hopper’s father was moving again.
“He managed to keep enough fuel in his car to fuel up and get a hotel in Rawlins once the road was clear,” she said. “He spent the whole day turning on his car long enough to run the engine and knock the chill off.”
The next morning, Hopper was back on I-80, continuing his long journey back to Mississippi. Hopper realized her dad was probably minimizing the severity of his circumstances for her sake.
“No parent wants their kid to worry about them,” she said. “He had been sitting on the interstate for even longer than I had realized when I called him and spoke to him.”
Hopper knows her father would have been in good hands, had he needed them. Her experience trying to help him showed her how much people are willing to step up for strangers in serious circumstances.
“I wholeheartedly believe that if they hadn't cleared the road when they did, somebody would have found him supplies,” she said. “So many people offered to help, and everyone banded together.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
