This post might seem a bit off topic, but as a landscape photographer you don’t usually get the luxury of traveling along well paved, well maintained, ice free roads.
Quite the opposite. And if you’re into landscape photography a fair amount of your time will be spent trying to actually get to the location you want to shoot in.
In 2 or 3 seasons out of 4 this will just mean, possibly, a long boring drive at the crack of dawn. But in the late autumn and, especially, in the midst of winter your biggest problem will not be an oversized yawn, but your own safety.
In the picture under the title you can see how one fairly well traveled mountain road might look after just a bit of snow – and this after the snowplows did their job – on a good day!
In this kind of road conditions, with a layer of snow, and ice lurking just under it, the only tyres I trust are winter (a.k.a. “snow”, “thermic” etc.) ones.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that an all-season tyre (even the “M+S”) can cope with this safely, IMO. With name-brand all-season tyres I’ve experienced pretty heavy fishtailing even going pretty darn slow; all it takes it’s a curve on the road headed downhill.
And in the mountains, especially along the “scenic routes”, there are often dozens of them. So please be safe, and sprung the few hundreds it takes to replace your tyres for the winter months.
