Although Firestone makes an excellent tire, the "HT", or known as highway tread, is not that great of a tire in the deep water or snow. The better choice of the Transforce tire family would be the "AT" transforce, known as the "all terrain" tire. More agressive, deeper tread with wider separation between the blocks which does, make more noise, but I'd rather have noise and performance than quietness and lack of peace of mind. The picture is my Transforce AT with over 20k miles on them. An excellent, strong tire. Akso, the way to check how old a tire is, when it was made, is to look at the 4 numbers inside the oval along the bead of the tire. These numbers shown indicate that my tire was made on the 46th week of 2015. (4615).