Take it Slow
Make this your mantra: ice and snow, take it slow. When snow is covering the road, reduce your speed, accelerate slowly and steer gently. Keeping your speed down will help prevent spinouts and keep your vehicle safe on the road.
Don’t Rely on Technology
Your vehicle may be equipped with all-wheel drive, electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes, but no technology can guarantee your safety on icy roads. Safety devices are designed to enhance safe driving techniques, not compensate for a lack of them.
Two of ten snow road driving tips offered by an auto insurance company in 2012.

Ice and snow, take it slow.
Don’t rely on technology.
The basics never change.

Most of us fortunate enough to live in and/or spend significant amounts of time in snow country are familiar with the pleasures, terrors, skills and mechanical demands of driving in snow. Those who take it slow will better appreciate the landscape of snow opened up to man’s incursions, for better or worse, by those snow roads. Those for whom safe driving techniques are a form of respect and attention to the present moment of moving through snow, not an inconvenient impediment to the final destination, the impressive goal or the self’s delusion of separateness from and control of the landscape (not to be confused with self-control), have more freedom to see and in some small way be formed by the persistent whiteness of snow layered upon all the dramatic and subtle shapes and forms of the land.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote, “The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us. Self-discovery comes when man measures himself against an obstacle. To attain it, he needs an implement…..” He also wrote, “Through all the centuries, in truth, the roads have deceived us.”
But we are mostly deceived through our own doing, our own lack of attention, our own failure to care, or, at least, to care enough. In the case of snow covered roads, we are deceived by moving too fast to be able to perceive the functional beauty of the snow driven roads and the landscape through which they weave. The earth can teach us nothing when we move too quickly across its surface, and we take that ignorance off the road and into our homes, offices, governments and personal lives. Relying on technology institutionalizes that ignorance.
Think of that.
Driving the snow covered roads of America is a metaphor for modern life in our country. Ice and snow, take it slow. Don’t rely on technology. The basics never change and they can never be institutionalized.
At this writing I am within a few weeks of my 74^th birthday and I tend to think more about basics than I did in other, yes, speedier years. The bard himself, Shakespeare, used snow as a metaphor for purity, and it is worth considering that how we are with snow roads driven, with snow itself, with hands on the gently steered wheel in a white-out blizzard at night on an unknown side road leading to a fabled mountain lodge where awaits the best companionship, food, ambience and backcountry skiing in the known world, is a reflection of our own purity in that world and of what efforts and consciousness we might possess to attain (regain?) that purity. Those efforts include the goal, impressive or not, of reaching the lodge without psychic or physical injury to oneself or to another; and the consciousness that we drive no snow road or any other alone.
Like most drivers of snow covered roads, my earliest memories of the pure white roads of America (in my case, Lake Tahoe) were in the company of my parents. My mother hated to drive, dreaded the road and would only drive in snow if she perceived no alternative. I was a junior ski racer in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before I was old enough to drive, and my parents, usually my father, drove me to the races around the west. By that time of his life Father had wrecked a couple of automobiles with impatience and inattention (and, I suspect, a bourbon or two too many), and he spared no effort to make sure it did not happen again. We spent many days and into the nights taking it slow on the blizzard obscured snowy roads of the Sierra Nevada. Dad’s ethic that getting to the race and back home safely was at least as significant and adventurous as the race itself was, alas, lost on my inattentive, impatient, goal oriented young competitive mind. Eventually (keeping it slow) Dad’s wisdom emerged from the fog of my own delusions into the (relative) clarity of the basics and I recognized the wisdom of his awareness in action.
I particularly remember one epic early 50s journey back from the North shore of Tahoe to our home at Zephyr Cove in a raging Sierra blizzard. The hour and a half drive took three times as long and we never saw another car outside our 1941 Plymouth coupe. Halfway home modern technology failed us. The chain on the left rear tire broke, came off and, by the time we had stopped and searched for it, disappeared in the snow of the incompletely plowed road near Spooner’s Summit junction. For the rest of the drive home Father, with intense concentration despite a frightened and vocally hysterical wife and a silent but equally terrified son staring into the abyss of the canyon above Glenbrook, kept it slow and gently steered the right rear wheel as close to the edge of the road as possible, the least slippery path in his judgment. It appeared to be inches but was probably feet to the edge of the canyon which dropped to infinity behind the blizzard, and Mom berated him the whole way to stay more in the center of the road, away from what Dad determined was the less slippery edge where the remaining chain would have maximum traction. Eventually we arrived home and, while the storm continued, we built a fire and Mom cooked dinner and Dad relaxed and I listened to the radio and there was a purity to the comfort, safety and attention to detail in action that I have always associated with taking it slow on ice and snow.
At the other end of the purity spectrum of snow roads driven is this: On March 6, 2011, Janne Laitinen of Finland, gently steered an automobile to a world ice driving record of 206.05 mph on the black ice of the Gulf of Bothnia in Finland.
Think of that.
And then think of the safe driving techniques, the gentle steering, the attention to detail, the finesse required to safely slow down and bring to a stop a vehicle traveling 200 mph on a gulf of black ice. And then think of the purity of the comfort, safety and satisfaction of dinner that night before the fire. Remember it as a metaphor for modern life on earth the next time you are taking it slow on the ice and snow roads of a world where the basics never change.
And remember it as a metaphor of a metaphor of snow as purity in this time when the snows of childhood are vanishing into the denials of human caused global climate change. Both the denials and the global climate changes are metaphors for impurity, and they are real.
Think of that.