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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

As I note in another comment - the gritters on that map are a small subset of all the gritters - those are just the ones that appear to be centrally controlled on 'major' routes.

We don't get huge amounts of snow (at least not very often) - but what we do get is a combination of snow and high winds - which can make it a nightmare to keep higher roads open.

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Which can be much harder to keep clear. Here in Minnesota, USA we get both large amounts of snow and high winds. It's not unusual to have whiteout blizzard conditions and MNDot (Department of Transportation) warning against any travel in some parts of the state..

They can clear a road only to have the wind cover it with snow again an hour later.

I live on top of a hill so I'm well acquainted with what happens when winds gust to 40mph after Mother Nature has dumped 6" of snow on us. Wind-packed snowdrifts suck ass!

Do you get icy-freeze-thaw conditions? Here in DC, we don't get a ton of snow, but when we do get winter weather, it's always just at freezing, so everything immediately gets thawed and re-frozen into ice. Most of my trips to Scotland have been summer, so only had snow up Glen Shee. The one time I visited in winter, it snowed a bit as I drove between Laggan and Dunkeld, but nothing dangerous.

"Glen Shee" - Scotland's version of the French Three Valleys! :-)

Not sure we get any kind of weather conditions (apart from wind and rain) with any predictability!

Ha! My parents are from Blairgowrie, so I've been through there often, but never to ski. Beautiful area any time of year. Apparently the Glen Shee road used to be a lot narrower, steeper, and twistier, and they sometimes had to reverse up one of the grades (reverse gear was lower than 1st in Dad's first car, a Hillman Imp, IIRC).

The twisty bit was called the Devil's Elbow [1], I remember going over it as a child before the modern road bypassed it. My parent's first car was a Hillman Imp too, I used to sleep on the shelf over the rear engine for part of trips up to Aberdeen.

I have had to fit chains to my car to get over the Cairnwell Pass, nothing passed me while I was fitting them and I could see people turning around lower down the hill, didn't see any gritters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairnwell_Pass

icy-freeze-thaw is perfect for ski resorts, but sadly it's rare that it happens. It rarely happens in the lowlands where most of Scotland's population lives. We do get frosts in the morning, but it's quite rare for sub-zero C temperatures thanks to our lovely Atlantic-influenced maritime climate. Never that cold in winter, never that warm (sadly) in summer.

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