Anniversary Trip: Day of Ooops

Sometimes one accidentally turns down the incorrect unmarked dirt road.  Sometimes one doesn't immediately turn around upon figuring that out 1/4 mile in.  Sometimes the road then turns to sand.

This probably isn't a problem if only two of three of those conditions hold in any given incident.

Here is the offending dirt road.  It took off from the main road probably only a couple hundred yards before the road we really wanted, and all of these desert tracks look similar.  When we turned off, I asked what the mileage on the van was, indicated that we should take the left at the fork in 1/4 mile, and then promptly stopped paying attention.  After all, there was nothing to choose until after that fork.

Then it got sandy.  "How far in are we?"  "About a mile and a half."  Argh!!!  If it was the correct road, we would have had a turn by then.  And by this point, I can tell that while it is going towards intriguing pointy mountains, they are the incorrect intriguing pointy mountains.  We don't want to take the van into that sand, plus I'm now 110% sure it is the wrong road, so time to turn around.

The spot we chose to turn around in looked solid.  That was a lie.  A nasty evil plot by the sand, as it desperately wanted to eat unsuspecting travellers.  Anything off the main doubletrack immediately turned into soft sand down an invisible lip.  One can't actually turn around here anywhere.  Uh oh.

But wait!  We brought the sand plates.  Surely that will help?

Why no, of course not.  The astute among you will have noticed that the sand plates in the pictures above are positioned all goofy-like by the time these pictures were taken.  There is a reason.  Let me lay it out for you:

Van is rear wheel drive, so those wheels are the ones that need traction.

So, what does one do?  One puts the sand plates behind the rear wheels, digs some sand out of the way of the front wheels and tries to back up.

Yay, it looks like it is working, as the right rear wheel (the one I am watching while Chad backs up) is able to move off of the soft sand and back up sort of onto the roadbed.

Then -- zZzzzzip!  The sand plates are sucked under the rear tires and spat out in front of them.  The one under the right rear wheel is now in front of the wheel, but still weighted under the van enough to be stuck there.  The one under the left rear wheel has been sucked all the way through and shot to the front of the van at high speed, and the left rear wheel has now dug itself a new hole into the formerly firm road bed.  Hmmm.  Not the intended effect.

Roadbed is hard on the top surface, covered by thin layer of somewhat slippery sand pellets.

Rear wheels are up on the roadbed, quite a bit higher than the front wheels.

Most of the weight is on the front wheels.

Slippery sand pellets act as little ball bearings to allow the sand plates to slide right under the wheels when the wheels are powered, and there is not enough weight on those wheels to hold the plates in place.  The wheels just grab the plates and shoot 'em on through.

Sort of looked like a cartoon to watch.  Except that one can't just change the channel.

What to do, what to do?  We tried using some vegetation for traction (not enough of it to help, plus it was creosote, so merely started smoking as the wheels spun over it).  We tried using the jack to lift up the front right tire so there would be more weight on the back (not successful, as we didn't have the big jack with us and the angle we were dealing with was larger than it seems in the photos).  We tried rocking the van back and forth while I shoved rocks into the hole under the left rear tire (partially successful, as I eventually figured out how to place the rocks get that hole filled without having all the rocks just spit through to the front.)  We had high hopes for that latter strategy, and did eventually get the hole filled and the back wheel moved a couple feet back off of it.  You'd think that would be a cause for celebration, but it immediately became apparent that now the angle of the van was that little bit more extreme and that back wheel, while it had moved three feet back, was now no longer touching the road surface at all.

Incidentally, I must have collected all the fist-size rocks within a 500-foot radius.  There were no rocks larger than this.  Now they are in a tightly packed deposit under where the left rear wheel had been.  Future geologists will be puzzled.

By this point, it had been a couple of hours.  I was in a state of absolute flow, placing rocks, problem solving, unaware of time passing.  Fortunately Chad noticed that it was getting to be mid-afternoon --the light was starting to change -- and that it would be a good idea to figure out how to get help before it got dark.  (While we *could* have just slept there for the night, the van was tipped at an angle that would have made it a bit uncomfortable.)  We really only needed to be pulled back about 3 feet more back onto the road and then all would be well.

A tow truck would probably be about a two hour wait.  Our friends also lived about two hours away.  Call the friends?  Tempting, but that would have had a high likelihood of getting friends stuck too.  We called for the tow truck, and after some discussion they decided to send their 4WD from Barstow, two hours away.

Chad stayed with the van, while I walked down to the point where the dirt road met the main paved road to meet the driver.  Didn't want him to go down the wrong little desert dirt road, and it wasn't like we could just say "We need a tow at 123 Main St"...  In this modern era, I also shared cell phone location with the driver so he could see where I was and I could see when he was getting close.  So I sat on the side of the road and caught up on old issues of the Economist, all the while tracking his little blue dot on the phone map.

Tony the tow truck driver from Barstow was wonderful.  He showed up about a half hour faster than projected, with his 4WD pickup on the back of a flatbed truck.

Isn't it a cute little truck?  The photos in the late afternoon light definitely show its best face.  The thing must have been more than 50 years old, and definitely had character that can only be described as "classic", by which I mean "can drive anywhere, but cantankerous as all get-out, and must have been old when your grandpa was a kid"   It only died once on the way up the dirt road (engine flooded?); after Tony got it going again he couldn't go slowly lest it die again, so the ride up to the van was a bit of a Mr.-Toad's-Wild-Ride up the bumpy desert road, amidst the cloud of automotive fumes emanating from the vehicle.  Sort of fun.

If we had these tires on the van, we wouldn't have gotten stuck.

The light was waning by the time we got to Chad and the van, but it didn't take Tony long at all to turn his truck around, hook up the strap, and pull us out of the sand.  He was nice enough to drive slowly on the way out to give Chad a light to follow, as we had to back down the mile and a half to the main road.  That's a quite a bit of backing up in the dark after a fairly long day!

Sunset on the way out.

We were lucky that I had enough cell signal earlier in the day to identify a place to park the van and camp just across the main highway and down a dirt road that was labelled as 2WD friendly, so we headed over, set up in the dark, and went to sleep.  It was pretty quiet there for all that it was close to the road, and we woke up to more gorgeous desert.

What I hadn't told Chad the night before was that the little short piece of dirt access road was another pipeline road....I had good info that the piece we would be on was short and in good condition, and just wanted to stop for the night.  Fortunately, the only side effect was a little bit of truck traffic in the morning from the training and work they were doing that day (yes, upon seeing this sign all I could picture was tortoises fleeing from the rumble of noisy trucks).  The previous 24 hours had not been the planned vacation day, but were certainly memorable!