Best Winter Route SLC to Orlando

December 23, 2005 11:10 AM

What's the best overland route between Salt Lake City, UT and Orlando FL? A friend has just moved out of state for work, and he needs me to drive his car out for him. So I'm hopping in the car early Friday morning and driving from Salt Lake City to Orlando... MORE INSIDE

In designing the route, I have a few issues that need to be addressed:

First-off, I'm worried a little about driving across the northern plains... so I'm considering taking a southern route: specifically, driving south to Las Vegas and then across the country across the southern reaches of the Rockies through Santa Fe. But I don't know that area, and for all I know it's worse than the northern route.

Secondly, my friend is considering flying out to meet me en-route Friday night (he has to work Friday)... so it would be handy to hit a town with a major airport Friday night (late).

posted by silusGROK to travel & transportation (9 comments total)

Go south, definitely.

Are you looking for the fastest or most interesting route?
posted by jjg at 11:26 AM on December 23, 2005

Looks like Google recommends the I-40 from LV to Memphis and then south through Jackson and then east along the coast. That would probably make a nice drive. But if you're looking for the fastest and shortest, head east from Salt Lake, young man!
posted by blue_beetle at 11:48 AM on December 23, 2005

Vegas seems like quite a backtrack. Crossing the colorado at Paige might still be a good way to go through, and then making your way on 40.

I do know from experience at just this time of year that anything that takes you within a couple hundred miles of the four corners can be a bit dicey driving this time of year. I've gone from Salt Lake to Midland TX via Cortez CO and Santa Fe and there was a fair amount of snowy driving on undivided 2 lane highway between SLC and Santa Fe. Coming back, we drove through northern arizona before crossing into Utah at the southern border which also made for a lot of snowy driving.

I'd make the decision just before leaving town, if I were you. If the roads are good through the rockies and there isn't a storm coming, then heading east by the fastest route possible.

If roads are bad and more bad weather is expected, I'd pick a more sothern route.
posted by Good Brain at 12:47 PM on December 23, 2005

PS. Any sort of winter driving through snow country can easily result in delays of 12-24 hours.
posted by Good Brain at 12:48 PM on December 23, 2005

Picking up on Good_Brain's advice, it seems like your best strategy is to figure out the easiest way to cross the Rockies given current weather conditions, and pick the rest of your route based on that.
posted by jjg at 1:18 PM on December 23, 2005

I could wait... but mostly I'm concerned with my buddy getting a flight to meet me.

Hm.
posted by silusGROK at 2:08 PM on December 23, 2005

Ooh, if you take the northern route there's a man in Illinois with a beard of bees...

...But on the southern route there's a chicken that plays tic-tac-toe.

(Friends E5 S22)
posted by lodev at 2:37 PM on December 23, 2005

In this age of GPS and Onstar and Google Earth, it's reassuring to know that the venerable Mapquest may still be the resource of choice: here's your personalized itinerary. This does seem to be the most direct route possible, sticking mainly to interstates. Of course, forecasting road conditions is important too, so try this Federal Highway Admin. website for specific updates and the dial 511 system.

Pluses: avoiding the much longer Vegas route (which could still expose you to bad weather), as well as bypassing the high mountain passes of Colorado. Minuses: boring driving on the northern route, bypassing major cities (and airports). Depending on your progress, a natural first stop is Cheyenne WY, 440 miles from SLC. (Next major airport along the route is Lincoln NE, another 445 miles.)
posted by rob511 at 3:15 PM on December 23, 2005

The plains aren't completely evil in the winter all the time. I've done a number of winter trips starting from Utah with destinations as far east as DC, logging most of my mileage on 80, and not only lived to tell about it, but passed several such trips pretty much without incident.

Of course, I've also tried to make such a trip on 70 and been stopped dead by a blizzard that dumped 12 feet of snow on Denver, shutting it down and blocking 70 off entirely in the mountains. And I know the same thing can happen to 80.

And the big problem may be that in the winter, Utah itself can be a terrible place for driving. Some of the absolutely worst weather I've ever travelled white-knuckled through (or wiped out in) was on I-15 between Provo and Cedar City. There really is no way out of the state that you can guarantee will be nice, since we're smack in the middle of the Rockies. And to top it off, the lean of the North-South interstates in the southwest seems to be ... southwest. Not southeast, which is where you want to go. So if you want to be direct, then you have to choose highways over freeways.

So if it were me, and the weather was agreeable, I'd probably plan to try to get down to I-40 by heading to southern Utah , and get to Paige AZ via either Colorado City or Kanab (bonus of Kanab route -- you can pass near or through Zion National Park!), then go south to Flagstaff AZ, which is on I-40. Once on I-40, I'd probably go east until somewhere between Oklahoma City and Memphis.

But if, while watching the weather through Beaver UT and Flagstaff AZ and maybe even Albuquerque NM I saw reports of a hairy-looking storm, I might actually choose 70 or 80 if the reports there looked better.

And finally, a note about the I-15 through Vegas route to Arizona: I know it looks severely out of the way, but I've done the drive to Phoenix several times by both the Flagstaff route and the Vegas route, and you're basically adding only 2-3 hours (depending on traffic over the Hoover dam and near Phoenix), because of the freeway vs highway speed difference. If the worst of the weather is through the mountains around Beaver, obviously this still isn't a great route, but if Flagstaff or northern New Mexico are the bad-weather points, and I-70 and I-80 don't look much better, and staying home isn't an option, it's a reasonable compromise, one I've made several times.
posted by weston at 5:17 PM on December 23, 2005