I’ve lived in Minnesota for 48 years, and have been driving here my entire adult life. Despite having spent a large amount of time on country roads and outstate highways I’ve never hit an animal bigger than a rabbit or raccoon. Last night that changed when we were driving up to Beaver Bay for a nice weekend away.

The entire way up was snowing which was fine, we just had to reduce our speed a bit and it was smooth sailing. Once we hit the two lane Highway 61 though we were fully encased in darkness and the snow became “hyperspace snow”.

For those of you not from winter climates this is when the snow is falling hard enough that your headlamps make it look like you’re flying into hyperspace from Star Wars. It’s just streams of white dots and lines coming at you. Turning on your high beams doesn’t really help as it just illuminates the short area in front of you. Needless to say your visibility is severely diminished.

This means that you slow down quite a bit, and for the most part I was sticking to around 40-45mph (in a 60mph zone). As we passed through the second of the tunnels on Highway 61, just south of Gooseberry State Park, we came down a small rise and across a tiny creek bridge and there they were. Standing right in the middle of the lane. Just hanging out.

I hit the brakes and make a quick judgement call to swing to the left since there was no oncoming traffic, and the deer was facing to the right. My hope was that they would spook and continue crossing in the most obvious direction, the way that they were already facing. However, deer are not known for being particularly thoughtful or sound in reasoning (the phrase “caught like a deer in headlamps” exists for a reason), and this particular deer decided that turning around to go back the other way was it’s best choice. It ended up being its last choice as my right bumper made solid contact with it going around 30mph.

It took us a few hundred yards to get to a spot where I felt like I could pull over safely on a snowy shoulder to inspect the damage. The front passenger side bumper took the brunt of the blow and it is pretty well shredded. Our passenger headlamp is completely out of alignment and points up in the air as well. Otherwise the vehicle is completely drivable and we managed to continue our journey to the resort where we’re staying for a few days.

I made an insurance claim and we’ll see what they think it’ll cost to repair. I know that panel work is often really expensive, especially on a 2014 vehicle where the value of the entire car is probably only $3-4K. This entire event took about 3-4 seconds. That’s how quickly things can unfold on dark snowy roads and everything can change.

More than that though I’m thankful that we’re OK and that I was able to make the best decisions I could in the moment to keep us safe and not in a ditch. I’m also grateful that we took the van for this trip because it has Falken Wildpeak A/T tires on it which perform really well in the snow. I had a lot more traction that I would have had on less capable tires. Additionally, the van is a much taller vehicle and so we were able to contain the hit to the bumper area instead of potentially taking a hit to a windshield in a lower car.

For now though it’s time to just enjoy the weekend and get out and snowshoe a bit and relax. I’m sure there will be more to this story once we get home and start figuring out what this looks like for the long term prognosis of the Adventure Van.