Montana’s I-90 Corridor is Having a No-Good, Very Bad, Yucky Day
From Missoula to Butte to Bozeman to Billings, the Montana Highway Patrol was very busy with crashes and slide-offs Wednesday morning.
The "crash map" looked very different hour to hour between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning as Montana encountered a significant amount of snow across most of the state. Gusty winds added to poor travel conditions.
Some locations got a little bit of rain before it started snowing heavily, making for EXTREMELY slick conditions.
US 93 south of Missoula had a particularly rough Tuesday evening as the bad weather moved into the state. From there, it was fairly textbook with the snow marching east.
NOTE: The map shown for this piece shows reported incidents from December 14th through 10:30am on Wednesday morning.
I-90 between Deer Lodge and Butte also had a particularly bad Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning with many slide-offs, but thankfully few injury accidents.
The Bozeman Hill Road Conditions Facebook group has been extremely active in the last 24 hours and is a helpful tool if you travel through that area.
Folks traveling between Ennis and Bozeman encountered better roads in Madison County than Gallatin County early Wednesday morning.
Although not immune, the Bozeman Pass area had surprisingly few incidents given that it can usually be a traffic nightmare during poor weather.
The Billings area along with the stretch of I-90 leading in and out of town got hit fairly hard with bad roads and ensuing accidents/slide-offs.
The Winter Weather Advisories will be leaving the state today in the same, smooth fashion that they entered. Eastern Montana advisories are set to expire by 2pm or 5pm Wednesday at the time of this writing.