Sunday May 31, 2009 at 19:26
Dinosaur in the mud
Approaching Storm, Escalante Overlook (click for large view)
Alice and I decided to visit our last unvisited Colorado National Monument/Park for Memorial Day weekend. Setting off early on Thursday evening, we staying in Steamboat Springs to break the journey and hit the monument early on Friday.
Our plan was to camp for two nights at Echo Park, widely reputed to be one of the finest camping locations in the state, particularly at the height of spring.
Getting there involves a twenty-something drive north out of the Colorado-side visitor centre on paved roads criss-crossing the state-line (Dinosaur National Monument straddles the Colorado-Utah border), and then a 13-mile drive down a steepish dirt road (the Echo Park Road, shown above).
We met a (grumpy) ranger who had just come up the road as we turned into the junction, and enquired after the road condition. “Fine. It’s dry,” he grunted, adding “just drive slow,” presumably to achieve his quota of holiday weekend visitor admonishments.
“-ly,” I said to myself.
We easily made it down to the campground in our SUV, found a handful of other visitors there and settled in for our first night’s camping. It began to cloud up dramatically later in the afternoon and the early part of the evening was blustery and grey, although without rain. We planned to be up for sunrise the next morning and so hit our sleeping bags early.
It rained all night. We didn’t bother getting up for dawn (what dawn?). I managed to find a weather forecast on a local AM station around 10am – rain and storms forecast through Tuesday. “Impassable when wet” was foremost in our minds.
What to do? After some brief debate, the matter was settled when the rain returned. We decided to make a run for it, rather than be stuck in the campground for the rest of the weekend and beyond. We’d seen some other campers leave too and so figured there’d at least be company on the road.
Now, there are two ways out of Echo Park. The “impassable when wet”, 13-mile Echo Park Road and the not-marked-impassable-when-wet, 28-mile Yampa Bench Road, reputedly not as steep as the former. At the T-junction, we figured this was the way to go.
At first, no problems. The road was quiet and while wet and somewhat sticky, the gradients were largely flat. However, around nine miles in, things took a turn for the worst. The intense red clay (as seen in the photo above) made a return.
This stuff is pure evil when wet. The car began to slide around alarmingly. Worse still, the road became twisty and steeper in places. Before long, conditions had deteriorated significantly. Whenever we encountered a camber on the road, the car would begin to slide off towards the side of the road (nearly always to the left, the river/ravine side – naturally).
We had to stop repeatedly. Particularly on left hand turns, and no doubt due to my inexpert mud-driving technique, we’d end up sliding into the crook of the bend, stopping before the PNR (point of no return!) and carefully placing rocks and branches to try to get some grip to propel us back towards the safe side of the road and around the bend.
We’d seen no one else, which of course, only served to reinforce our sense that we’d made a bad choice somewhere 15 miles back up the road. 28 miles began to feel awfully long.
All of a sudden, while placing more rocks and brush under the wheels, we saw two men round the corner on the hill below us. They looked very pleased to see us. “How’s the road further on?” I asked. The fact that were walking up the hill towards us should have been hint enough. Sure enough, their truck had slid partially off the road, just around the next bend and they’d been forced to spend the night sleeping in the cab, with one front wheel off the road (something of a drop below), a rear wheel up the air and the other two embedded in red, sticky clay.
We edged down and around the corner, managed to squeeze past the back of the stricken truck by millimetres (that old side-slip thing again) and eventually positioned ourselves for the tow-out attempt. Orlando (the truck owner) had a chain we could use to tow.
What began as a careful attempt to tension the chain before applying power, quickly degraded into a reverse-create slack-floor it exercise (as the truck refused to budge with the more demure approach). Despite the numerous, chassis-shaking stops caused by the chain snatching, eventually the truck was pulled free.
With the 4-wheel drive blown, one tyre out (plus the fact that the spare had blown the night before too), the truck wasn’t in the best of condition. However, we decided to proceed on out in convoy, the guys deciding to abandon their fishing trip (it seemed they might have been minded to press on one point).
Just as well, we ended up needing to pull them out twice more, and in turn, they pulled us out of what otherwise would have been a game-over moment (for the car at least).
Eventually, the truck gave up altogether when the flat front tyre ripped off the wheel. We abandoned it around 30-miles from Dinosaur town (what the National Park Service brochure doesn’t mention is that once you get off the Yampa Bench Road, you still have a further 20-miles of dirt and gravel roads to manage before you hit the highway).
The whole saga took around six hours. There’s no way either of us would have made it out without the assistance of the other. We saw only one more car the entire journey, and that was out towards the end of the road.
Lesson learned: if a road is marked “impassable when wet”, they mean it. If a dirt road is not marked “impassable when wet”, but is three times as long and located in the same vicinity, then chances are, it too is impassable when wet. I’m wishing we’d taken photos of the drive out now, but at the time, stress levels and a beat-the-rain urgency suggested focussing on the task at hand.
Miraculously, the car escaped unscathed. Of course, we managed to blow a tyre on the paved road on the way into Vernal, Utah that night. Divine retribution, I’ve no doubt.
The next day, we ventured back into Dinosaur National Monument, not straying from the paved roads. At Harper’s Corner overlook, I saw the most intense Indian Paintbrush I’ve seen since moving to Colorado – way better than anything else I’ve seen colour-wise:
Indian Paintbrush at Harper’s Corner
This was the view of the Green River (yes, it’s brown – from all the evil red clay) from the overlook itself. The rafters seemed to be having a great time of it, from what I could tell two thousand feet above:
Green River, stained red by evil mud
So, a drama-filled visit to Dinosaur National Monument without a single photo of the famous Steamboat Rock from Echo Park. Maybe next time.
Posted in Locations
Stephen · Sunday, May 31, 2009, 19:26 · Permalink
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