Winter tires - locker - LSD what works?

[johnnycrash]

I'm planning on skiing everywhere from tahoe to big sky to whistler to bannf - this year. So I will be out driving in the snow all the time. The rig is my portable office so I can live at ski area parking lots and still make enough bacon for car payments and diesel. I've never really had trouble in the snow even though I drove I70 from denver to the mountains a couple times a week for 25 seasons and then lived another three years in lake tahoe. It's this driveway and roads leading right up to it. It's very narrow, so any mistake puts you in the ditch and the ditches are huge or filled with boulders or just cliffs down to rivers. My previous snow car was a WRX which you could control up an icy mountain road even though the tires were doing 50, the car was sideways, and your ground speed was only 5 mph. I would weave in controlled drifts around all the other cars that were stuck on the mountain passes. But this rig is different and this driveway is like the bermuda triangle of driveways. The ice and consequences are nuts. Maybe I'll take a picture on the way out today if I live.

[REF]

What jage said, plus I'm assuming you have factory rear limited slip, and unless you are doing some serious off-roading and get into some more difficult 4X4 trails, your limited slip should suffice, especially in snow, there are several threads on the subject of limited slip, Detroit lockers and trutrac from Eaton, which are a very nice more aggressive gear driven limited slip. I lived in Tahoe for a few years as well, during El Niño 97-98, had a subaru that plowed through anything, or so I thought, just got a new forester and swapped in some blizzaks, now I can plow through anything while still retaining control, which is nice. Play around with tossing your rig in an empty parking lot to see capabilities of your 4X4 and those blizzaks. Have fun! By the way, I'm running Toyo mud terrains, mud terrains are crap in the snow, thinking of swapping over to Goodyear duratracs next set, they have the mountain peak rating for snow.

[johnnycrash]

Update on the blizzaks. Turns out we got no more snow the entire year. This was a bad year for skiing. However I did get caught in a nice blizzard driving back from ohio to seattle. I don't think I skid even one time (unless I tried to) over 2,000 miles. MT, ID, and WA were fairly wet snow from 1 inch to 1 foot deep and north dakota was in the process of building large wind blown drifts. ND felt like 50 mph crosswinds, but I have no way of knowing how fast the wind really was. From time to time I was the only thing out on the road. I was able to maintain highway speeds or near highway speeds the whole time; although, I had to slow down to 30-60 in the mountain passes depending on the curves and the steepness of the down grade. I got passed only a few times in those 2000 miles.

My mileage is still around 14. the road noise was a LOT less.

I don't know if the blizzaks are the best, but they sure worked great.

- john