For anyone that does not live in the skyvalley area (monroe, snohomish, sultan, goldbar, etc), the hwy 2 and hwy 9 routes are no doubt some of the most dangerous lanes of traffic in washington state. hwy 2 between snohomish and stevens pass has claimed 54 lives since 1999!
that said, my wife and i had a close call today and didn’t even know it.
we were traveling east on hwy 2 from everett and had just passed snohomish. I remember passing a white semi-truck with a gravel trailer heading west and thinking to myself, “i’d hate to pass that while pulling my camping trailer”. a moment later we passed the highway safety sign that has a digital reader showing the number of days since the last major accident (33 at the time). Then we came to the first stop light of monroe and an ambulance passed us heading west.
it wasn’t until later in the evening that i learned of the accident and put it all together. I estimate that we missed the accident by under 5 minutes......... to put that into reality for you, that basically means two stop lights in everett or a few mph slower over a period of time.
as scary as this is, it makes me wonder. how often to we all survive close calls with fate/death and never know it? are we all just one bus stop from our soulmate? three minutes shy of being the next serial killer’s victim? or one fish away from the shark being full and passing us by vs taking a bite?
you could go insane worrying about the what “if’s”. so i guess you should prepare for the worst and hope for the best, living life to the fullest in between close calls.
be safe out there.
