February 3, 2021 - In 2010, Pam and I took a three-week vacation to the West Coast. After Yellowstone, Wyoming, Idaho and California, and Oregon, we were returning home through Colorado and turned on a road leading to the peak of Colorado’s tallest mountain, Mt. Elbert. We were pulling our old Red Dale Travel trailer and failed to read the sign that forbad our entering this steep mountain road with our truck and trailer. It didn’t take long for us to realize we were not equipped to climb the super steep road.
As we trudged up the road, we were suddenly engulphed in a blinding snowstorm. Pam laughed out, “Look, it’s snowing!” But the beautiful snow became a blizzard snow and as we got close to the peak, we started sliding backwards and slid dangerously close to the edge of a bottomless precipice. When Pam shouted out, “Get ready to jump!” Had I jumped from the passenger side, I would have literally jumped over the cliff and Pam would have been lying on the icy road. But suddenly at this do-or-die moment, our trailer jack-knifed and slid to a stop only three feet of the cliff’s edge.
Since there was no traffic on the mountain, we figured we might be stuck for days in the blinding storm. “We can wait the storm out,” I said. “We have propane and plenty of Campbell’s Soup.” So we got in the trailer, opened a can of Cream of Chicken soup, and as it warmed on the burner, we heard a motor outside. I opened the door and there he was: a huge man driving a huge orange snowplow. “You need help?” he hollered. And within minutes we were back on the road and following him as he sprayed gravel from the back of his truck. A few miles later, we were safely at the bottom of the mountain.
When we got back home, we told our story to our church. “That wasn’t a man that helped y’all,” one of the members said. “It was an angel.” “I know angels can take many forms,” I laughed. “This one even smoked a cigar and had tattoos on his neck.”
