Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
People don’t often have fond memories of digging a vehicle out of the snow or mud, but they remain as sentinels to many in their outdoor encounters with the Wyoming wilderness.
The season of mud is past for most of the Cowboy State but patches of mountain roads, and even a few soft spots on the prairie remain to surprise the unsuspecting driver.
Much of Wyoming’s mud is unique to the United States. Mud is loosely defined as the mixture of earth and water but that doesn’t do justice to the slick, gray ooze that covers the ground throughout the Big Horn Basin and in many other spots across the state.
There isn’t a slicker naturally occurring substance than good old bentonite-laced mud. Even the deepest tire treads are no match for the organic slime that waits silently for the unwary traveler or off-road enthusiast.
Pat McManus was once asked what the most thrilling part of outdoor adventuring was. He promptly answered, “Getting stuck.”
The legendary outdoor writer was correct.
I once spent a three-day weekend with three friends fishing on Union Pass. It was the 4th of July weekend. We were high above Dubois in the Fish Creek drainage, and it didn’t appear to be mid-summer at that altitude. There was even a skiff of snow on our sleeping bags one morning.
We were fully equipped with all the standard outdoor fare. We had one shovel and a small hydraulic jack but we didn’t think we’d need those tools since we were driving a ¾ ton Chevy 4×4.
We had a topographic map we picked up in Dubois, the kind of map that lists the species of fish you could expect to catch in certain lakes. The more interesting lakes claimed to contain grayling but we could see from the snowpack that they were still out of reach in mid-summer.
We settled on one that listed lake trout, as its main species and set out.
There are many two-track roads along the Union Pass Road. We took one that looked like it led to the lake trout. A few miles in, a stream about 35 feet wide blocked our path. It was moving pretty fast, but we could feel the solid bottom with a 15-foot lodgepole snag. There were wet tracks leading up the other side of the creek indicating someone else had crossed recently.
Just in case our scouting was wrong, we backed up and I gunned the engine to get up speed.
The bow wave that crossed the hood and crept up near the windshield was the first warning that this might not be the best weekend we’d ever spent in the wilderness.
I could feel the rear end of the truck float out of the water as the front tires grabbed the opposite bank.
We didn’t stall out, but we barely made it across.
Just a few minutes later we were stuck for the first time. The road was washed out so I turned onto the bank and promptly sunk up to the bottom of the frame. The shovel handle snapped on the first load of earth and we were seriously stuck. The jack just pressed into the earth and we couldn’t find any big rocks. The nearest timber was about a half-mile away so we set out to get enough wood to lift the truck back to terra firma.
A scant three hours later we had the front wheels out of the muck and onto a makeshift road of pine and fir branches. In four-low, I crept the truck in reverse. We were out. Just in time to catch a couple of brook trout for supper from a nearby stream and then off to sleep by a fire made out of our rescuing wood.
We were a little gun shy, so we hiked the last four miles to the lake.
The mackinaw wouldn’t hit spinners, spoons, flies, or nightcrawlers. We caught a couple of suckers on worms and cut them into chunks of bony, white meat. We hooked the sucker meat onto number two hooks. The lake trout hit right away.
After catching a few mackinaw, the biggest surprise came on the way out when a couple of guys in a 2-wheel drive service van passed us as we walked back to the truck. The real insult came when an SUV passed us just a few minutes later. Did they take the same road?
We did our version of Moses crossing the Red Sea with the truck at the flooded creek on the way out and set our sights higher up the pass above the Fish Creek Bridge.
The road into the basin was a good one, a solid rock base with a few shallow washouts and just a little dirt. The fishing got better the farther we went in so nobody noticed the grayish section of road ahead. It looked like a shadow from some of the neighboring trees but a shadow doesn’t’ make the sickening sound that only mud sucking around tires can. We had an instant low rider, the driver’s door was in the mud and I had to crawl through the window to get out
It was the worst I’ve ever been stuck but we did have plenty of wood nearby. One of the guys suggested making a jack out of a trunk of lodge pole pine. I asked him where he got that idea and he said, “On Bonanza, I watched Hoss pull a wagon out of the mud with a couple of poles.” If it worked for Hoss, Little Joe, and Ben it would work for us.
Archimedes was right. You can move anything with a long enough lever and the correct fulcrum point. It took three of us to lean on the end of the pole to lift one side of the truck. The other guy put wood blocks in the holes under the tires. We did the wheels one at a time and laid other blocks behind the tires to make what was called a corduroy road during the Civil War.
We backed out and didn’t go any further. Two axle settlers in two days was enough.
Schools are always looking for “real world” problem solving exercises to prepare students for life after school. My suggestion for a viable experience involves a truck, a handyman jack, some chains, and a small shovel. Put these materials in the right circumstances and you have a uniquely Wyoming method of testing your problem solving skills.
Enlightening and exciting, a great combination in the great outdoors.
If adventure has a name, “Getting Stuck” has to be one of the finalists.