15' High Snow

I just completed a week-long driving tour of Bosnia Hercegovina. I took the Field Director-elect couple to meet our personnel as well as their national coworkers. It was an excellent week for all of us.

We ended up the trip in the Serb Republic part of Bosnia Hercegovina (there are two halves to the country after the Dayton Peace Accords). This part of Bosnia is just 30 minutes from the Montenegro border. Traveling this way back to Macedonia is much faster, though potentially much more hazardous as the roads are always subject to rock slides and snow in the winter months.

We had to decide if we wanted to chance going through Montenegro and Kosovo taking us about 10 hours, or retracing our steps through Bosnia and then through Serbia which would take about 16 hours.

We chose to go through Montenegro, as the weather looked OK. The further we drove toward the high mountain that separates Montenegro from Kosovo, the more snow we began to see on the ground. As we began to slowly ascend, the snow got as high as 15 feet on either side of the car! The small two-lane road became a very small one lane tunnel. We did not see a single car going up the hill with us and we got a bit nervous to know if the road was even open. A couple times we had to pull over to allow for vehicles coming down the mountain. One time a front end loader had to make a new path in order for us to navigate around him.

When we got to the top of the mountain and the border (with Montenegro), we were still the only vehilce headed in our direction. Six miles later, we reached the other border (with Kosovo) and discovered that the pass had been closed for the previous 4 days and that it had just reopened within the past two hours. We were one of the first cars through!

We are thakful for God's protection as we traversed this Balkan mountain pass.

Thanks to you too for praying for us. We rely on your prayers! Keep them coming!

Trent