Extreme Weather - Uruzgan Style

This may look like a dust storm rolling in, but it's actually SNOW and a lot of it.

Why does this qualify as extreme? I mean, it's Afghanistan right? High mountains, the Hindu Kush lots of snow? And while that's all true, especially for Northern AFG, where I was in the valleys of southern part of the country significant snowfall was relatively rare.

We made it back just fine as the snow started to fall thinking it would pass by in a few hours. But as time went on it kept coming!

This is where my pictures run out, I know I took more, but they're either on another hard drive or lost in a computer crash...

As the snow fell we ran into a problem... It was "gumming up" satellite traffic!! My best friend had been voluntold a few months earlier that he was going to be in charge of keeping the SNAP (?) System up and running, so naturally I found myself ontop of a roof helping him shovel snow off of a satellite dish...

With that problem solved we went back to bed.

If my memory is correct it snowed for a solid 12 hours or so and dumped about 8 inches of heavy wet snow. The air was red because of this meaning helicopters weren't flying. This put basically all pending missions on hold because without helicopters medevac is basically impossible.

The next day it was in the 50s/60s again and missions picked back up. We had scaled back out optempo as we were beginning to prep to start the journey home.
The SF-ODA we shared the base with (read: it was their base and we were guests) was fresh and wanted to keep their optempo up.

The day after the snow they headed out towards one of the hotspots of the area.

About 2 hours goes by and the call comes in for QRF (quick reaction force) which of course was us. We geared up and hit the "road" (read: double wide goat path)

A quick aside:

The first photo in this post that is turning into a book is from the driver's seat of a M-ATV (Mine resistant ambush protected All Terrain Vehicle) pronounced Mat-Vee. I really liked mine overall and it protected some of my buddies when they got blown up. Pretty capable vehicle, but they weighed a metric shitload (in this instance that is about 18-19 tons give or take). They were also wide as hell which made navigating mountain passes kind of sketchy.

Alrighty:

So to get to the area where the ODA had managed to get one of their trucks stuck a particularly sketch pass had to be navigated. It involved a hairpin turn with sheer 500 foot drops on the outer edge.

We made it around and down to the SF team. Helped them recover their truck and then started on our way back.

The pass was just as sketchy if not more so on the way back because this time I could actually see down the side of the mountain! As the saying goes ignorance is bliss and not knowing just how close the tires were to the edge on the way there certainly was bliss!

We made it down though just fine and here's where it got a little interesting. As we hit the flat and were able to accelerate something I had never experienced in almost 9 months of driving those massive metal cans happened. The backend started to come around on me.
Somehow almost as if it were defying the laws of physics my 20 ton vehicle decided it wanted to throw up some rooster tails in the mud.
I don't know if I had a more surprised look on my face anytime during that deployment as that moment.
Thanks to the freak snow ("extreme" weather) here I was fish tailing in mud of southern Afghanistan!!

We made it back to base just fine and thus ended my "muddin'" career 😂

If you made it all the way down here a) thanks and b) I hope my ramblings were somewhat coherent!

If you're a veteran and have your own extreme weather story type it up and enter @shadow3scalpel's story contest!