IDAHO SPRINGS, Colo. — Interstate 70 is back open "for now" following a roughly 17-hour closure due to hazardous conditions, the Colorado State Patrol said.
"The road is open for the time being but we're going to find ourselves in another mess soon," cautioned Sgt. Patrick Rice with the Colorado State Patrol. "So please if you need to travel, keep that in mind, otherwise stay home."
Many travelers hoping to make it to or from the mountains ahead of the snowstorm - instead spent the night in their vehicles - either on the highway itself or in parking lots when the highway was shut down Wednesday between Silverthorne and Golden.
"We left Vail at 3:30 yesterday [Wednesday] and we're still on the bus," Brenda Djorup said Thursday morning.
She was one of many people stuck on the highway. She is with a group of 60 women who make trips every Wednesday to ski, usually in Vail. They got stopped periodically on their trip back to the metro area but had been stranded on the highway near the Central City exit since about midnight.
"We're not talking to you because we want to complain. We're talking to you because we're not alone," Djorup told 9NEWS earlier Thursday. "This highway is packed with cars and semis and other buses. It's an urgent kind of situation."
She said around 2:30 p.m. that she had just gotten home. She explained that they were finally able to move and traveled home on near-empty highways. Shortly before 4 p.m., the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) said the highway was open between Vail and Denver.
9NEWS reporter Matt Renoux was on the west end of the highway closure Thursday morning - where parking lots looked more like campgrounds.
"Once we got here it's as far as they let us go," said Robert Vallad, who was traveling from Michigan with his wife to visit his brother.
The couple had it better than many others because they were able to sleep in their RV. Since it's spring break, most hotels were already full - forcing many people to spend the night in their cars.
Matt Inzeo, a spokesman for CDOT, said their biggest obstacle to getting the highway back open was the Floyd Hill area.
"We have a lot of semi-trucks that just don't have chains on their wheels right now, despite the conditions," he said earlier Thursday. "And we are having to pull them up Floyd Hill one at a time with some specialized equipment. That is the operational issue that we are confronting and we are trying to work through it as quickly as we can."
According to CSP, at least 30 trucks have been stuck and most were not chained.
"Rest assured, chain law tickets have been written for truckers who have gotten stuck," said Sgt. Rice. "Those are those thousand dollar tickets. There's even been some proactive when we've seen them passing chain stations or leaving chain stations without proper chains and those are a little bit less, a $500 ticket."
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