Washington State Patrol, via Reuters

On January 2, 2020, The New York Times reported:

In ghost towns and gunslinger movies, they drift in ones or twos, cast wherever the wind takes them. Along a long stretch of road in Washington State, the tumbleweeds took over instead: more like monsters out of science fiction than lonely icons of the American West. On New Year’s Eve, hundreds of them tumbled over and onto a highway, State Route 240, covering a stretch three football fields long. In some places they piled up 30 feet high, trapping cars and trucks for hours. By the end of the night, the authorities were calling it “Tumblegeddon.” . . . Crews from the Washington State Department of Transportation used snowplows and their hands to clear the tumbleweeds, which amassed near the city of Richland, in a more arid part of the state about 200 miles southeast of Seattle. Officials closed 20 miles of the highway so crews could clear the road. It took 10 hours to move the tumbleweeds.

What exactly is tumbleweed anyway? According to Northern Arizona University, it's actually an invasive species:

One example of a famous and very successful invasive plant is the tumbleweed, or Russian thistle. This iconic symbol of the West is actually an invasive species from Russia that causes serious ecological problems. For instance, tumbleweeds play an active role in wind induced soil erosion. When tumbleweeds die, they uproot from the ground and as the wind blows them across the desert terrain, they loosen the top soil layer making it more prone to wind erosion.

Although Russia has denied any involvement in Tumblegeddon, President Trump purportedly called President Putin to congratulate him on the first successful deployment of the Russian thistle system known as Avangard. "I thought it would be faster," he said.

Michael Bay is said to be in talks to acquire the rights to this story.