LA, how do you sleep at night worrying about this stuff??
Get your truck, where you live you will not want, wish for or need chains unless you're trying to rip up a snomachine trail with a foot of packed snow on it.
You could have d@mn near bald tires and since you're planning on carrying around 3klbs of dead weight all winter in the bed, you will get about as good of traction as physically possible.
Yes, you can buy waaaay better traction tires for mud, ice, snow than whatever will show up on most any new truck. That is a given, save for special edition type trucks that actually come with tires that people WANT to have. The rest are mediocre, typically value line tires, however they are sufficient for most purposes, at least through the first half of their treadlife.
If you do feel the need for more snow/ice traction, take the OE tires, whatever they are and go have them siped as deep as the shop will sipe them (.5" is usually max). That will turn a mediocre set of ht/at type tires into good snow and ice tires.
