There are a lot of good winter tires out there. Something with a lot of treadblocks (spaced apart), sipes, depth do well in snow, slush and hard roads. If you can run your hand over a tire and it feels 'smooth' it's not going to be a good winter tire.
This should do well:
Cooper Discoverer M+S LT 265/75R16 112/109Q C (6 Ply) Winter Tire
www.prioritytire.com
Below are actual (real) pics of tires I bought for my plow Jeep (Cherokee) 2 yrs ago. I've had a lot of different tires, some good, some not so good. After a LOT of looking around I settled on these (below). Yeah they're kind of a no-name tire, but work great for my purposes. I really love them. There were a lot I looked at but they didn't meet my needs. I wasn't shopping on price. I needed a good all around but esp winter tread, and something that would 'bite' in the snow for plowing and driving in pretty deep snow. The tread is fantastic for snow & slush, and will push a lot of snow. We had a LOT of snow last year and get some pretty big drifts on our looong driveway. They run smooth on the road, and seem good in the summer too. The compound is a touch softer, which is great for the winter, but a guy could drive this tire year round, unlike most dedicated snow tires. Search Walmart.com.
Tires that will be good in snow, I mean good traction on
packed winter snow like you see in ID and we get here ...need to 'hold' some snow between the tread blocks. The science is that snow crystals bind together (snow on snow) and produce traction on packed snow (like plowing on a hard-pack snow driveway. Seems counter-intuitive. Therefore you want reasonable space between tread blocks to hold enough snow to get traction, but not too much space that snow kicks out. That's what I like about these tires. Also sipes and square'd-off edges (like Blizaks) flex under braking/torque to expose edges for traction and braking as they flex. If Blizaks or the above Coopers (in the link) came in OWL and 15" I'd have bought them. But they're not so much an all-yr tire either like the ones below.
The must-have specifics I needed for my plow Jeep for plowing snow were:
- Good winter tread (spaced out/deep/sipes)
- Deep tread, and tread blocks somewhat odd-shaped and staggered (not in a straight line). These aren't as staggered as I'd like but traction is nonetheless great.
- OWL (white letter). Yep ...gotta look good. I don't buy anything that's not OWL. None of the normal winter tires (e.g. Blizzaks) have OWL ...so I had to cross them off my list. Yep, I'm shallow ...lol.
- 15" for my plow Jeep are harder to find these days (but they have other sizes, same tire - Walmart.com)
- Tread blocks that go ALL the way to the carcass ..and on the edge too. Some tire designs are of such that much of the tread on the edges doesn't go all the way to the bottom of the carcass. They seem 'out-of-tread' even when they still have 30% left. I don't buy tires like that anymore!