Icy roads cause difficult morning commute

It was a rough start of the day for many commuters.

Icy roads and fog slowed down traffic throughout Northern El Paso County.

Drivers in Monument pulled over at gas stations to scrape their windows.

“It frosts up and you can’t see,” Kyle Gonciarz said. “It’s going to be a rough day out there today.”

Scraping windows is just the first challenge of the icy commute.

“We have rear-wheel-drive, so we have to be extra careful, drive pretty slow,” Gonciarz said.

Hazardous road conditions are not what John Peterson had in mind. He’s driving a 52-foot trailer full of collector cars to Scottsdale, Arizona.

“I left Fort Collins this morning and it’s been a long, slow trip,” Peterson said. “There’s a lot of magnesium chloride on the road and it gets all over the windshield. Sometimes it’s hard to see in front of you.”

He stopped in Monument to fill his windshield wiper fluid for the second time today.

“I’ve used almost a gallon in 100 miles,” Peterson said.

When setting out on an 800-mile trip, Peterson said he’ll drive slowly when he comes across slick roads.

“I haven’t broken 60 miles-per-hour all day,” he said.