2022-07-20, 07:50 AM
(This post was last modified: 2022-07-20, 08:04 AM by MojaveGeek.)
Wow, what an incredible trip. You must have been sweating bullets, with the vehicle bogged down and in the middle of a real nowhere. A monster ordeal to get a tow to get that truck back onto the road at the bridge. At least you got to feel good when on the road again! I'm just thinking about the times when I've said "Oh crap, now I've really done bad". Well, you did real bad.. and lived to tell about it. Just amazing.
Of course some classic "take google suggested routes with a grain of salt" but you had a vehicle equipped for a lot of what you encountered. This adventure does fit with a pattern that I see, including in myself. You have a plan, you have a route / timetable worked out, but then things start to go south. Road goes bad. Weather starts to build up. Route becomes more of a scramble and then significant exposure. Loop back part of a hike turns out to be hard to follow. But since we have these plans, we get sucked into an increasingly deteriorating situation, going with the flow. Until eventually...
I'm just back from a couple weeks in Montana. My rental was nothing fancy, a Camry. I was way up into the mountains on a dirt road which gets some traffic when I hit a rock and there was this bad dragging sound. Well I crawled under the front end and lo, someone ELSE had smashed the plastic under carriage plate and wired it up (literally, with some barbed fence wire) and that had come out. I spent an hour fixing and improving the repair. At the point I had about 3 inches of clearance but I muddled through it. Later, in town, I bought some tin snips so I could just cut it all off cleanly if it dropped again. I told the rental company about it (I think they would have seen anyway, as the "maintenance required" display was on, probably wanting an oil change) and am waiting to see if they try to bill me for the repair. "Didn't you notice the damage before you drove the vehicle off the lot?" Me: "No, I don't routinely crawl under a rental to verify its condition".
Or, what TacoLand said above. The problem is that it is easy to armchair quarterback this, and harder when you're actually the driver/hiker, whatever, and therefore caught up in it.
Anyway, I'm still in awe by the fact that you managed to make it work!
Of course some classic "take google suggested routes with a grain of salt" but you had a vehicle equipped for a lot of what you encountered. This adventure does fit with a pattern that I see, including in myself. You have a plan, you have a route / timetable worked out, but then things start to go south. Road goes bad. Weather starts to build up. Route becomes more of a scramble and then significant exposure. Loop back part of a hike turns out to be hard to follow. But since we have these plans, we get sucked into an increasingly deteriorating situation, going with the flow. Until eventually...
I'm just back from a couple weeks in Montana. My rental was nothing fancy, a Camry. I was way up into the mountains on a dirt road which gets some traffic when I hit a rock and there was this bad dragging sound. Well I crawled under the front end and lo, someone ELSE had smashed the plastic under carriage plate and wired it up (literally, with some barbed fence wire) and that had come out. I spent an hour fixing and improving the repair. At the point I had about 3 inches of clearance but I muddled through it. Later, in town, I bought some tin snips so I could just cut it all off cleanly if it dropped again. I told the rental company about it (I think they would have seen anyway, as the "maintenance required" display was on, probably wanting an oil change) and am waiting to see if they try to bill me for the repair. "Didn't you notice the damage before you drove the vehicle off the lot?" Me: "No, I don't routinely crawl under a rental to verify its condition".
Or, what TacoLand said above. The problem is that it is easy to armchair quarterback this, and harder when you're actually the driver/hiker, whatever, and therefore caught up in it.
Anyway, I'm still in awe by the fact that you managed to make it work!