Stubbornness can be stupid

I had heard that there would be snow in the forecast, but I wanted to get some fieldwork done for my thesis. How bad could it get? My field site is pretty sheltered, so when I was out working and noticed the snow was falling rather heavily, I decided to cut my day a little short.

15 minutes after hitting the road, I drove into this.

Ok, it doesn't look so bad, right? Well, the other car in the picture drove into whiteout conditions, and I followed, white-knuckled. An hour into the trip back, I sort of lost the road, and I came out of "100% whiteout" into merely "hairy" and found that I'd been driving on the wrong side of the road.

I should have pulled over, but I was afraid that a. conditions would worsen and b. there was no safe place to pull over. I've been in analogous situations a couple of times before, and for all cases we were trying to make it home in front of storms that were overtaking us.

What is particularly stupid about the day I took the photo was that I chose to drive to a field site hours away with potentially bad conditions in the forecast by myself. I would like to think I've learned from that experience, but it's easy to say while I'm sweltering through a heat wave and snowstorms seem very far away.

Please, don't be stupid like me. The fieldwork can wait.