The Road from Hell

By Jen.

NOTE: Forgive the wordiness of this post. I wanted to catalog our stupidity for future reference so we won’t be inclined to do it again.

It is raining, we are covered in mud from head to toe, and slipping along the wet surfaces with different ends of the winch to get the van back on the road. I am praying desperately and wondering what it would cost, and if it were even possible, to do a helicopter rescue for a van in a forest on a steep the side of a mountain.



How did we get here?

Finishing the Lolo Motor Way, we needed to get back to highway 12 to escape the wilderness and find our way back to civilization. The road we planned to take had a road-construction sign on it, with a pasted-on notice of “up to 4-hour delay.” That was a bit disconcerting, but as it was a Sunday, we weren’t too concerned. We made our way down and decided to camp for the night a few miles out from the highway, figuring we would be out before the construction started or perhaps it was already done. Monday morning, we got up early to soft rain and headed out only to find that with less than 4 miles left to the highway, the road construction crew was already digging a trench for some new drainage. This meant no way around until they finished, possibly up to 4 hours later. Rather than doing the smart thing and asking them how long and a recommended detour, we just turned around and decided to find our own way out. Our first option was behind a locked gate, so we tried the next option: Big Hill Road. This was a crapshoot; Google said the road ended while the GPS said it went all the way to Highway 12. It was only 10 miles total, so we figured we would just turn back if it wouldn’t work out. We made the turn and it wasn’t locked, so we proceeded forward. The road was nearly the same quality as the road we had just turned off on, which was a good start. It slowly got worse, but it wasn’t bad. Just a little more grass growing up in the center, trees less trimmed.

Not bad, right?

We came across a gate that was partly opened/closed that had a restricted-use sign. We figured since it was open, we might as well as continue. The road looked fine. While the road slowly degraded, the change to no-turning back happened suddenly.  First the road became enclosed by trees (pretty common in the forest). Then road became muddy, treacherously narrow, and covered with high-centering ramp-ditch combos all fairly simultaneously. We rolled through the first one, as it wasn’t too bad and there was less than a mile left. Surely it can’t get much worse… Yes, yes, it can get much worse.

Forgive the blur and composition of these two pictures, the darkness and motion didn’t lend to nice ones.

A little narrow, but doable right?

At one point, while avoiding a tree, our back right tire managed to slip off the road slightly. We hadn’t even noticed. As I was getting out to help cut down some branches, and I looked down and thought the ground was a bit farther down than I would like. So I looked to the back to see if I could head out that way instead. The view had me fairly scared. It was bad enough that I wouldn’t have been comfortable trying to walk past it to get to the backside of the van. Jonathan got out the winch and put us back on the road. I cut my first branch with a saw and we were on our way.

It was actually worse than it looks here…

The branches we were trying to avoid at the time.

If you look really closely, you can see our tire marks in the dirt and grass to the right of the fern on the left side of the image. The hill drops off pretty quickly to the right.

We reached a really tall bump at 0.7 miles from the highway and thought that we probably couldn’t make it, especially without a lot of work. So, we put on the chains and tried to back the van up the muddy slope until we could find a turn-around.  I also learned why you should “always keep your body parts inside the vehicle at all times.” To keep us on the right track in reverse, I had to keep my head out the window and managed to bang my cheek on the window frame during one rough patch (surprisingly no visible bruise). After 30 minutes of high-stress slipping and sliding, slow motion, and just narrowly avoiding taking off key parts of the van with trees, we decided that there was no way we could do it. It was at least 0.25 mile until the next possible turnaround and it was a sketchy one that. So, we decided our only way was down.

At least the occasional views were pretty.

We learned pretty quickly that we couldn’t leave the winch on as it destroyed our departure and approach angles. That scraped mud is where the winch hit…

So, we pulled out the shovel, and Jonathan went to work re-landscaping the road. Then we took it slowly. I had the job of telling if it would high-center or not. I wasn’t very good at it. We scraped several times, but mostly got through it.

Then, we came across a particularly nasty one at about 0.3 miles out. This one could high-center us, plus we could slide downhill into a ditch and high-center and not be able to get out. This was a near breaking point for us. We walked the road again to the exit, determining if it was still worth trying to go this direction. Trying to determine if we thought we could handle it. I was truly near tears and trying not to give rise to the panic. Jonathan prepped the road and the van and walked me through what he thought we would do. We talked about what would happen if the winching went wrong. Basically, we settled on the plan that we would keep going forward until we couldn’t. If it got stuck so bad we couldn’t do it ourselves, then we would get help. Our lives weren’t in danger, we had supplies, we could walk out at any time, and the van wasn’t in danger of being totally destroyed (yet).

That isn’t stuck in the mud, that is a particularly high ditch-ramp combo. Yes, this is the bad one.

We were trying to keep it from going down into the ditch where the log was.

We took a break, ate a snack, and made sure we weren’t being stupid, then started winching. As partly expected, pulling the van forward dropped the rear right tire into the hole on the side of the road, but not unredeemably so. We repositioned the winch and started again. Shortly, it was pulled over the hump and back on the road.

It went into the ditch anyway.

We made it out and over!

This was just the start. We continued over the worse of the bumps like this.

The high-centering hump that only caught on the rocker panel below our sliding door and made it concave instead of convex.

The road was terrible. Too narrow for the van’s track width. Mostly mud and wet grass. In many patches we were simply guiding the slide down the path and hoping we could stop before it became a problem. At several points, the van was tilted down hill left-to-right that I was beginning to be afraid we would reach the roll-over angle on a bump. About a quarter of the way down after we put on the chains, the chains on our left rear tire broke, so we were doing this with only one good-traction tire. 

Re-landscaping the road. After running up and down the hill for a couple of miles and all this shoveling, etc., we were sore for the next week.

It was a very stressful time. White-knuckled, I kept wishing that helicopter recovery was evenly remotely possible. We were praying as we went along that we would make it out of this with ourselves and the van whole. Five hours after we got stuck the first time, we finally made it to last turn, exhausted and muddy. It was particularly sharp for the current muddy conditions and the size of the van, but no life-ending or van-crunching falls, so after some more prep, we powered over it with a disconcerting (possibly axel-bending) bump and a scrape and were faced with the last hurdle: a locked gate.

Some flowers next to the road.

We had had 5 hours to figure out how to handle it. After a brief break, we walked to the nearby buildings, but no one was around. Immediately upon finding no one, I stuck out a thumb to get a ride and the first person who saw us stopped! I literally hadn’t had my thumb for more than 5 seconds when he passed us. I think that is a record! He kindly offered to give us a ride to a nearby ranger station, so I sent Jonathan ahead so I could get the van manageable while he got some help. I thought he would have to ride 30 minutes down the road, but they found a station about 10 minutes down the road.

We made it!

Apparently the gate wasn’t supposed to be locked, so we weren’t going to be fined. But, the key that they had wasn’t the right one. Most likely, someone (maybe a local resident) had put their own lock on it. So, after some calls, the ranger returned with an oxy-acetylene torch and cut it off. We were finally free to go! The van was covered in mud outside and inside, but at least we could now walk on the floor.

Our van looked trashed afterwards!

We ended they day by going out to eat at a Pizza Factory and washing the car before the mud caked on. Definitely a day I don’t want to repeat in the van. I had 3 heroes that day: first and foremost, my husband, who worked tirelessly in the mud and rain, shoveling and winching; the winch, which slowly pulled us out of dire straits and definitely paid for itself that day; and the humble shovel, which made landscaping that much easier. 

The heavy smoke disguised the sun as it set on our long day.

For those interested, the damage:

We had to clean that out every time we needed the winch on the front. One of the reasons we need to move the winch-mounting point.

The high-centering scrapes. Our skid plates (engine and transmission) most of the damage.

Lots of mud everywhere underbody.

The rocker panel was once convex, and the auxiliary fuel tank was jolted as well.

Different angle: from convex to concave.

Different angle: the fuel take used to rest higher.

This used to have an air hose attached to it and oriented 90 to current… 😅