A snowstorm shut down more than 200 miles of Interstate 80 on Monday, stranded motorists for hours and in some cases overnight as blizzard conditions hit southern Wyoming. Both directions of the highway between Rock Springs and Cheyenne were closed to all through traffic by 10:46 a.m. Monday, while wind gusts up to 45 mph and wet, heavy snow turned the pavement into slush and near-whiteout conditions.

The scene on the ground was far worse than a routine closure. In Rawlins, resident Marianne Nelson said, "I've got three semitrucks parked in front of me," adding, "I guess there's a tow truck somewhere, but he's stuck, too. I can’t see anything, and I only have a quarter of a tank of gas." By 11 a.m., she had been stuck for nearly six hours after getting onto Interstate 80 at 5:15 a.m. for her commute.

The storm was not just dumping snow on the highway. A damaged power transmission line in Carbon County around 2 a.m. left Rawlins, Sinclair and Wamsutter without power for most of Monday, and the outage hampered the Wyoming Department of Transportation’s work to clear the interstate. Jodi Burrer said, "They couldn’t fuel up in Rawlins because the power was out. They had to get the plows to Sinclair to fill up."

By noon, WYDOT was clearing 4-foot drifts, with as much as 10 inches of snow reported in some places along Interstate 80. Meteorologist Don Day said, "I've had reports of 30 inches of snow in Snowy Range," underscoring how quickly the storm intensified across the region. One WYDOT snowplow was struck while clearing Interstate 80 near the Wagonhound Rest Area between Arlington and Elk Mountain, another sign of how dangerous the corridor had become.

Jordan Young said the agency had heard "anecdotally of stuck vehicles between Laramie and Rock Springs, but don't have any hard numbers," and warned that "Plowing drifts from stuck and stopped vehicles can delay reopening the highway." Those drifts, along with the shutdown of towns along the route, helped drive the decision to put westbound Interstate 80 on a rolling closure to avoid overwhelming communities where highway passage was impossible.

As of Monday evening, officials expected the westbound and eastbound lanes between Rawlins and Laramie to reopen between 6 and 8 a.m. Tuesday, while both lanes between Rawlins and Rock Springs were anticipated to reopen by midnight Tuesday. Cheyenne had no significant snowfall on Monday, but the closure still rippled across the state because the storm had cut the interstate's main east-west link. For the people trapped on it, the question was not whether the snow would stop. It was how long the road would stay impassable after it did.