Stuck in the Mud

One day, I discovered that four-wheel-drive is no match for clay and gravity.

I love trucks. When it comes to sedans, I'll always favor Honda, but in my opinion nobody makes a truck like Chevy. Often, state and federal wildlife agencies will have a suite of vehicles available for field use. When I worked for the USGS, I drove a Dodge Durango and an old Ford Bronco; but for almost every other job, I drove Chevys.

When I worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the Mexican Wolf Reintroduction Project, I think we had 10 or so trucks to use at the field office. There were at least 5 Dodge Rams (my least favorite), 2 Fords (including an Explorer with a fried electrical system and a ginormous F-250), and 3 Chevys (two Silverados, and a wrecked Colorado that a volunteer had flipped some years before, left in the parking lot as a reminder for us to be careful on the curvy roads).

My trusty white Chevy in Willow Creek, NM

When I worked on that project, I didn't know how to drive a manual transmission and nobody wanted to teach me. Since the Explorer sucked, the F-250 was way too big for our everyday field needs, and most of the Dodges were manual, I had my choice of the two Chevys. Thus, an old, white, beat-up Silverado became my faithful steed.

Although it was old, it was reliable. I took that thing on the roughest roads Arizona and New Mexico could throw at me, only once got a flat tire and never got stuck in the snow or mud. My coworkers would come back after long days of having to dig their Dodges out of ridiculously small patches of snow, and once my friend spent hours digging herself out of being high-centered on a sandy road in a very remote part of the Gila National Forest. 

My biggest problems ended up being the tailgate rattling off its hinges and the right taillight falling out of its socket as I sped around on the bumpy washboard roads. It also, apparently, had bad brakes - they worked, but only if you floored the pedal. I didn't realize that was a bad thing until somebody else drove it and told me. My own personal stupidity also caused problems once or twice: Once, as I was backing out of a "parking space" in the office (see picture: parking and reversing was a constant game of hide-and-seek with mature pine trees), I cut the tires to swing to the left without noticing the pine tree I'd parked next to coming towards the driver's-side window. I ended up partially removing the mirror and making a huge dent in the driver's side door, which my boss tried unsuccessfully to pop out later with a plunger. 

The office.

It took a few days for the mirror to be fixed, so in the meantime I drove the other Chevy - a green Silverado with a few more thousand miles and slightly less reliability. But it was still a Chevy. 

One day, my task was to drive around some dirt roads near the Arizona - New Mexico border to look for signs of uncollared wolves - a frequent task that involved driving slowly with your head out the window scanning for tracks and scat on the side of the road. I was in an area south of the main highway in the national forest, in hills too steep to allow for reliable radio transmission, and not a town, house, or campground in site. 

It had rained recently. The dirt in that area was such that, when wet, it filled every tiny tread in our tires and made the roads gooey chutes of rich red-brown clay slicker than ice. As I headed gently downslope toward the river on the curvy roads, I tested the roads in the wider sections to determine how fast I could reasonably go without sliding around too much (a boundary I'm rather fond of pushing sometimes).

I wanted to make a big loop, starting low in the southeast and heading west and north and up until I met back with the main highway. Consulting my map, I saw that if I could reach the terminus of the east-west road, I'd hit a bigger road that would take me north, giving me a fast and easy exit back to pavement. The further and further west I drove on these sketchy roads, the more my determination grew to make it to this bigger road, to not have to turn around. Thus, when I finally crossed the river and found myself staring up at the road winding steeply up the other side, I didn't instantly admit it as a disaster waiting to happen. 

The green Chevy on Greens Peak, Arizona.

I started creeping up the hill, when suddenly a black Suburban came around the corner in reverse. As I backed up and waited, it slowly, ponderously, methodically navigated the sharper curves and made it down to me. They rolled down their windows. It was a couple of tourists from a campground several miles away, exploring the muddy wilderness. They told me they'd tried to make it up the steep hill, but it was just too muddy and slick. They turned around and drove back the way I'd come.

Even that didn't deter me. My truck was lighter, and I figured I was more experienced with four-wheel driving than they were. Stubbornly, I put the truck in gear and crept slowly back up the hill. The road was flanked by a steep downhill on my left (south) side, with a cliff on my right. Between the road and the cliff wall was a shallow ditch filled with thick mud. 

After ten or so minutes with no improvement in the road, and no end in sight, I finally decided to give up. As the road was far too narrow for turning around to be an option, I'd have to copy the tourists and head all the way down in reverse. I made it most of the way and was on the final curve, when I miscalculated and went straight for the ditch. Before I could correct, my right wheels had already slipped down the gentle curve, and the rest of the truck slowly, inexorably, followed. 

I was stuck. I spent a few minutes shifting in and out of 4WD, shifting back and forth between reverse and drive to try to get whatever little momentum I could in the limited space. Try as I might, I just couldn't give my right side enough traction to breach the little bank of mud separating me from freedom. The more I tried, the deeper the holes I dug, the more I became enmeshed in the ditch's grip. 

Of course, the steepness of the hill prevented me from successfully contacting anyone on the radio. I had no handheld, just the built-in system in the truck, and I'd stopped carrying a cell phone long ago for the lack of reception. I half-hoped the tourists had stuck around to make sure I'd gotten out OK, but they were nowhere in sight, and they never returned. 

I was on my own. I could either wait here for someone in the office to realize I wasn't coming back, and come find me (they knew the general area in which I'd gone), or I could try to get myself out. 

I made a quick inventory of my supplies. A shovel. My floor mats. My clothes. Some planks of wood in the bed? Where did those come from? They might come in handy. I had a winch, too, but I had no idea how to use it. 

I got to work with the shovel and the floor mats, digging troughs beneath the tires and stuffing the floor mats underneath, digging pits for the wooden planks in front. Periodically I would re-enter the truck, play around with the gears, and re-exit to rearrange my system, getting close but never quite close enough. 

I was covered, head to toe, in mud. I had actually taken off my boots because they'd gotten so heavy with the stuff, and my bare feet gave me better traction in the slippery mess anyway.

Finally, after about an hour, I re-entered my truck for the last time. A little bit of reversing, then a jolt of forward momentum, a second or two of suspended motion and uncertainty, and then - I was free! 

I got out one last time to retrieve the planks and floor mats. Then I did a little dance. I thought briefly about the next person who would come up this road looking for wolf sign, and wondered what they'd think of this strange, sudden appearance of  bare human footprints in the middle of the road. 

It was late in the evening when I finally got back to the office. I stepped through the door in a blaze of glory, proud of my muddy clothes and my muddy truck outside, because I - little old me, a 24-year-old, female, relatively experienced field volunteer - had dug my truck out of the mud all by myself. 

Unfortunately, nobody was there. 

Although I soon went back to driving my trusty white Chevy, I had developed a sort of bond with the green one now. It had been just me and that truck out in the wilderness. By getting stuck, it had humbled me, revealed the flaws in my assumption that I was invincible; but then it hadn't left me stranded, either. We were a team.