Truckers stuck in neutral during highway closures in Sask.

There was a lot of sitting around and waiting while Saskatchewan highways were closed for several hours Tuesday morning.

Truckers stranded in Regina, where all highways surrounding the city had been closed early Tuesday, said visibility out of the city was non-existent for hours.

“I can sum up the roads and the weather in one word: Challenging,” said one driver who had been driving in from Winnipeg. “It was a typical winter storm.”

Danny Jopsin was driving in from Alberta when his boss told him to stop in Regina before going any further.

“From what I have seen, it hasn’t looked good,” he said. “I was hoping and praying that I could stay here for a couple more hours and hopefully get my load of cattle and go.”

Henry Wolfe said he was trying to get to Belle Plaine, west of Regina, but the commute turned out to be an impossible task.

“I tried to leave this morning but it was a whiteout,” he said. “I made it as far as the Ring Road and when I tried to come back, it took me two hours.”

When asked what he does while he waits, Wolfe was quick to say he got a lot accomplished during the brief hiatus.

“Play some games on my phone. (I) bought a vacuum cleaner at the truck stop and finally got to do a good cleaning,” Wolfe said with a chuckle. “It was well overdue.”

It wasn’t just some truckers that had a slow morning. Some gas stations sat empty with no one on the roads.

“Normally we are busy in the morning, but this morning we were dead,” said Pam Michelle, a gas station attendant in Moose Jaw. “There was no traffic whatsoever.

“We get a lot of traffic going back and forth to Regina. This morning, we had no one.”

The highways reopened later in the morning, but the Highway Hotline was warning people of challenging conditions as of Tuesday afternoon.