The 2024 holiday season came with copious snowfall in the Cascades, a recipe for traffic headaches and dicey conditions on the snowy highway to Mt. Bachelor.

As the ski area touted the deepest snow base depth in the country, social media posts and stories of mountain-goers described a miles-long snake of traffic back to Bend on Century Drive, while videos showed cars struggling to gain traction.

“It’s like a disconnected train of hundreds of cars that are just slowly marching up,” said Eric Sedransk, who drove to Mt. Bachelor on Friday.

Sedransk said the snow was so deep along the road it created a tunnel of sorts with little space to pull over.

“It’s one road in and one road out,” he said Monday. “One potential bad driver can cause a monumental effect.”

Read more

Atmospheric river burying mountain areas in snow in Central Cascades

It took Sedransk about an hour to reach the mountain from his home in east Bend. He said that’s not an overly extended travel time. But he forfeited a trip to the mountain on Monday for fear it would take him twice as long. Among friends, he heard trips from Bend over the weekend took longer than two hours.

He said he feels traffic to Mt. Bachelor has worsened in the several years since he moved to Bend. While the Oregon Department of Transportation keeps tabs on yearly traffic counts on state Highway 372, or Century Drive, no readily-available data shows whether more cars are heading to the mountain this year as opposed to last.

Mt. Bachelor does not track the number of vehicles pulling into its parking lots, said Presley Quon, a spokesperson for the ski area. Quon said the mountain is always busier between Christmas and New Years.

This year, mother nature added heaping quantities of snow — about 5 feet in seven days — into the mix.

“This is almost like the perfect storm — 5 feet of powder during the week in the holiday season,” Sedransk said. “You can’t script it any better, or any worse, depending on your perspective.”

Quon said Bachelor’s parking lots were “open but full” midday Monday.

Mt. Bachelor’s website on Monday was reporting 218 inches of snowfall so far this season , or more than 18 feet.

From the perspective of the state transportation agency, heavy snowfall and heavy traffic are not an ideal combination.

“When there is heavy traffic on any road, it means that the passes we make on any given section are fewer and further between,” Kacey Davey, a spokesperson for ODOT, said in an email.

Still, the level of maintenance on the road to Mt. Bachelor is the same as last year, Davey said. ODOT was criticized on social media when posts showed slow-moving cars sliding helplessly to the side of an apparently unsanded road, but Davey said crews have been sanding and plowing as usual this winter.

Read more

ODOT: Maintenance steady on road to Mt. Bachelor 

Crew members were continuously running three plows and sanders, one grader and one blower over the weekend, Davey said. Crews generally sand hills, curves and intersections, she said.

Quon said in an email ODOT has done an “excellent job” keeping up with snow removal and winter maintenance, and encouraged guests to check the agency’s website for traffic updates and ensure vehicles are equipped for winter driving.

Mt. Bachelor also encourages people to use the ski bus service that shuttles riders from Bend to the mountain and back. Buses leave Hawthorne Station in midtown Bend at 6:40 a.m. and 8:15 a.m., and go back and forth from the mountain to a westside Bend park-and-ride throughout the morning.

Trends in ridership data from shuttle service operator Cascades East Transit would suggest more people are riding the bus to the mountain than in year’s past. Nearly 56,700 people rode the Mt. Bachelor shuttle in 2024, as of November, including summer riders for mountain bike excursions. The number grew from 48,800 in 2023 and less than 35,000 the previous year.

With more people boarding buses to Bachelor than ever, the transit service has noticed more “aggressive riders,” said Bob Townsend, director of Cascades East Transit.

“We have numerous incidents already this year (where) people waiting to get on the bus are cutting lines, forcing their way onto the bus, and getting into verbal altercations with other passengers,” Townsend said in an email.

Bus service will continue to increase with the help of a Federal Lands Access Grant allowing the transit agency to buy six new buses for Bachelor. Available driver numbers are also on the upswing. But because the shuttle is a tourism-based route, the transit service likely won’t ever subsidize the cost, Townsend said. A round-trip ride to Bachelor costs $12 while buses around Bend are free.

“We are hopeful to continue to increase our service up the mountain, but it can’t come at the expense of providing the necessary services within Bend and the broader Central Oregon community,” he said. 

Sedransk suggested Mt. Bachelor could offer discounted tickets to people who carpool to the mountain. Traffic troubles have driven Sedransk to start catching the bus to the mountain even though he has never done so before.

“There needs to be this collective mindset,” he said. “Whether it’s carpooling, getting on the bus, all of that will make a difference.”