Where Have You Off-Roaded Today? 3rd Gen

This one was not today, but one of my favorite nonconventional trips:

 

Is this in PA?

 

Yes, this is the Grafitti road in Centralia PA. I have heard that it may have been torn out or covered since..

 

Is that the abandoned road they built with the tunnels too? Looks like a place I’d spend a lot of time in as a kid.

 

Oh wait. Sorry. Different spot. Apparently centralia is burning with an underground coal fire

 

Yup that's the one. Very cool place to explore on a weekend trip. You still see smoke coming out of random hills..

 

Damn, that has to be creepy. Would be fun to poke around in those houses. I bet the wood in some of those houses is worth a good amount right now, seeing as how it’s an old town in the ne, it’s probably all solid oak, not the frames but still.

 

Looks like offroading is pretty much done for most of British Columbia for the rest of this summer. Over 60 wildfires broke out in the last 24 hours. Over 19,000 lightning strikes in that one day throughout the interior.

The village of Lytton BC, burned to the ground yesterday. There, it reached 121F a few days ago, and several days of that. Many of the fires are threatening homes with thousands of evacuations and fire season has just begun. There has been no rain since January 1st in the Okanagan and many parts of the BC interior. Record drought. Backcountry access will be restricted soon by law, and good thing. Too many dunces who insist of having a campfire still, and chucking cigarettes out the window. Some never learn. Here in the Okanagan, we have been between 105F and 115F for 7 days now, and next two weeks are about 100F every day. Not a good situation, we are heading for a record fire year. In 2017 and 2018, 3 million acres burned each of those fire seasons with tens of thousands out of their homes for weeks at a time.

Be careful out there. Don't start any fires or you can burn down an entire community.

This fire map shows just the fires that started near 100 Mile House, and Highway 24 known as the Fishing Highway. Hundreds of fishing lakes in that area. Every orange, yellow and red symbol is a fire that started last night. Most fires will be around 5 acres, and in a day or two each will be over 5,000 acres due to the extreme heat and dryness. The red area is Deka lake which is now evacuated. These are ranches and farm homes and folks who like living "off the grid" so to speak.

 

Imogene Pass; Ouray to Telluride

 

Alabama hills in the Eastern Sierras.
https://youtu.be/cv2uHxS5K5M

 

That double ditch lights though! Nice!

 

Tested out the new suspension today

 

Engineer Pass; Lake City to Ouray

 

Almost slid it off an old mining road in NE Oregon.

 

There’s a road there?

 

looks like a painful route you took there

 

Holy crap! What were you doing up there? Glad you’re alright though

 

Just wheeling, exploring the mountains and checking out old gold mines. That was actually a really cool trail till it got super narrow on a shelf, saw some awesome ruins and it was a really fun level of technical driving. I caught my spare tire coming down off a rock on a narrow part and it slid me sideways and put a wheel on the edge which gave out. I actually drove a good 20 feet with one of the wheels on the collapsing bank before it dug in and got me stuck but nothing I could do would get me back up on the road.

I was with another rig(wouldn't go on that sort of road alone) but his winch chose that moment to fail(he'd even used it recently). We ended up pulling it forward with a Hi-Lift, every time I could get a little traction up in the holes my buddy would get a couple cranks on the jack. Every time we had to reset the jack we'd stack rocks under the wheels. Eventually we got me up out of the holes and as far to the inside of the trail as possible, unfortunately my rear driver wheel was still on the collapsing edge and would still not get enough traction to pull out of it. We ended up putting a soft shackle around my leaf spring and yanking the rear end the last few feet it needed to go with the hi lift.

The road got even narrower after that spot so we decided we'd have to back out a good half mile to the last turnaround point, but it was almost dark by then and that would've been impossible in the dark so we hiked to a camp-able spot(we both have RTTs but luckily also both have backup sleeping stuff).

The next morning we actually repaired the collapsed side of the road and regraded it to not be cambered towards the edge in the sketchy part by moving a ton of rocks and spotted each other as we gingerly backed out.

This photo's from just before it opened out into the shelf, and part of what we had to back through.

 

Wow!!! Now that’s an adventure! Glad you guys made it out safely. Thanks for sharing your solution; hopefully it’ll help others find their way out of a predicament.

 

Of course! Honestly the Hi-Lift was my buddy's, pretty positive I'm investing in one after that experience even though a winch is going on my truck as soon as my backordered bumper arrives. They're a little sketchy to use(you are very aware the amount of tension the thing you're yanking at is under) but it really saved our asses.