Worn tires and wrong tires not enough for Colorado roads: "Boy, when you need them, you need them and it's a lifesaver for sure"

The season of winter driving provided a harsh reminder Thursday night with a half dozen vehicles sliding out of control on Interstate 70 between Genesee and Chief Hosa. The highway was closed for hours as cars and trucks were cleared away.

Time after time, tow truck operators see similar problems with substandard tires. 

"Often they're all-season or summer tires and they're usually below the tread depth that's either effective or sometimes even legal," said Charlie Stubblefield, owner of Mountain Recovery, a towing operation based in Vail and Silverthorne.

When Colorado puts passenger vehicle traction and chain laws into effect, the law requires minimum standards for tires. At least 3/16th tread depth and a variety of other traction options, either four-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, a mud and snow designation (M+S icon), a winter tire designation symbol (a mountain snowflake icon), or an all-weather rating in addition to the option of using chains or other traction devices. 

Mountain Recovery runs about 5,000 incidents a year, many in storms. For Stubblefield, he tries to exceed the minimum tread depth requirements on his personal car, saying mountain driving really makes it necessary. 

"I'm making sure that my tires usually whenever I run them are probably a quarter of an inch or better," he said. 

Often the vehicles they tow are rentals.

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"They're renting cars that aren't mud and snow or winter rated at all, don't have that snowflake icon on there of the M+S icon… it's going to need to be actually rated for snow and ice rather than just an all-season tire," he said. 

Other times, people just haven't gotten around to getting winter tires on or have trouble affording better winter tires. 

"Boy, when you need them, you need them and it's a lifesaver for sure," he said. 

The key he says is to look for siping. That is slim slits across the surface of the tire that improves traction with grabbing. 

He explains the tires, "allow as a tire touches the ground to expand and allow those treads to actually penetrate into the snow and ice." 

Older snow tires wear down to a point in which the siping is no longer visible. They are far less effective.

The Colorado State Patrol says it does not issue a lot of tickets for inadequate tires due partially to the volume of work during storms, but when drivers with improperly equipped vehicles cause accidents, the citations are more common. 

"It's so prevalent up here that if state patrol sat and wrote person a ticket for every spun out vehicle, they wouldn't be able to cover the crashes that happen on the downhill," said Stubblefield.