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If you ask me, four-wheel-drive is for wimps -- lily-livered flat-land freeway motorists who have no more business on a back road than I have at a debutante ball.
You can ignore all those colorful ads that show brand-new CD-equipped air-conditioned $30,000 sport-utes fording creeks and dodging rockslides. These wimpmobiles might get you there, but they will not improve your character nor give you a full appreciation of our mountains.
The truth is that you can go just about anywhere in a rusty oil-burning cracked-windshield two-wheel-drive beater truck, providing that it has high ground clearance and a manual transmission.
Not just any manual transmission, though -- it's got to
be a stiff-shifting four-speed whose bottom gear offers a
maximum over-the-red-line speed of 12 mph. This gear often
bears a name -- granny,
compound low,
the
big hole,
or the stump-puller
in various
regional vernaculars -- rather than a number.
The back-country talents of such a truck were made manifest to me in the San Juans in the late summer of 1971 when Martha and I left Lake City on a gravel road that headed up Henson Creek. We were just looking for a place to camp that night, and we were driving a 1959 Dodge D-100 Townwagon -- the two-wheel-drive cousin of the Dodge Powerwagon.
Our truck had some front-end problems -- keeping it in
your own lane was a challenge at any speed over 10 mph --
and so we called her Waltzing Matilda.
The lower campsites were occupied as the road climbed, gently at first and then ever steeper as the road surface went from tolerable to tooth-rattling. In those days, we had faith that we could find a camping place that we wouldn't have to share (going into the mountains is a deeply anti-social act), and so on we went.
Somewhere past timberline, we were climbing a 25 percent grade on a narrow talus shelf, so narrow that I couldn't see any road, just swirling mist far below, beneath my door.
Turning around was impossible, backing up was a terror, and so onward and upward. Wherever Matilda's steering wheel is today, I know that it still has my fingerprints impressed in it from how tightly I gripped it while slowly appreciating the full majesty of the core of the San Juans.
Not having the vaguest idea where we were then, I felt more than relieved to see a paved road -- which turned out to be the most twisted part of the Million Dollar Highway and a few more miles of white-knuckle terror, given Matilda's unpredictable response to the steering wheel.
By the time we saw the Ampitheater Campground above Ouray, we really didn't care that there were other people around. Thus I became a more tolerant person, and even to this day, I will at least consider camping where other people are visible.
Upon our return to civilization from that trip, I asked
a knowledgeable Coloradan about where we had been.
Jesus,
he muttered. You went over Engineer Pass
in a two-wheel-drive? Do you know lucky you are to be here
to tell me about it?
Matilda had chugged along just fine, purring like a big cat as she ground her elevated way from the Lake Fork to the Uncompahgre, so I dismissed his remarks about luck as exaggeration, and continued to explore the San Juans with Matilda.
After all, putting Matilda over Engineer Pass had been an unforgettable adventure, an expedition that might have been mere routine scenery-gazing if I'd had a four-wheel-drive.
The same held for a venture across Ophir Pass the next
summer. Some say that Ophir was named for a biblical
place of gold,
but another version credits a
prospector who, upon looking down into the western abyss
from the top of the pass, exclaimed Oh, fer God's sake,
look at that hole.
The latter theory made sense when I
reached the same vantage.
Matilda's length was such that she couldn't directly maneuver the sharp switchbacks on the downside. I had to back up. I'm not very athletic, but I was able to maneuver the clutch, transmission, foot brake, and emergency brake with split-second precision -- a personal talent that I never would have discovered in a stubby little regulation Jeep.
Are there other benefits to two-wheel-driving in the high country?
Of course. I felt a surge of Colorado patriotism one
summer afternoon at the top of a posted four-wheel-drive
pass. A fat Texan driving a big four-wheel-drive Chevy
Suburban eyed my rig and told me Son, you'd better turn
around raht now. You'll never get that down the fah
side.
Love for my native land surged through me as I thought
This is my state and I'm not going to let some damn
Texan tell me where I can and can't drive.
It didn't
occur to me then -- blame it on the altitude, perhaps --
that most Texans are good-natured folk, and that he
actually meant well.
I did make it home that day (after sunset, but a little before midnight), and the garage charged only $314.27 for the ensuing repairs to the frame, suspension, and steering.
That's about what I had to pay after the next
expedition, where I learned about a process called
rock-skinning
which can, in just a few minutes, turn
a brand-new set of tires into a shredded and stinking mess
with no more tread than you'd find on a glazed
doughnut.
Not only did I get an education, but look at how much I enhanced America's Gross Domestic Product after these two-wheel-drive excursions, and tell me that we'd be enjoying the present economic boom if I'd had a four-wheel-drive designed to handle such roads.
Besides improving the economy, the back-country two-wheel drive also offers exercise and a chance to enhances one's creativity. One Matilda successor was a 1967 three-quarter-ton Chevy pickup -- two-wheel-drive, of course -- that could climb any grade in the Rockies, but whose turning radius was wider than a locomotive's.
One day, it got wedged between a rock and a hard place while I was trying to get turned around where a back road ended. I got out the five-foot-long spud bar and levered the major rocks out of the way. I was still stuck.
Out came the log chains and a discount-store come-along, which turned out to be made of such flimsy metal that its handle began to warp before the pickup showed any evidence of motion. Even so, I persisted.
Then the whole assemblage snapped, sending chain, hooks, cable, and come-along parts flying in several directions -- not mine, fortunately. My daughters, unscathed but terrified, learned a valuable lesson about staying well out of range when they see men doing stupid things. Also, their mother then took them on a healthful walk in the woods.
I was about out of profanity, breath, and ideas when I pondered the widowmaker jack, which weighed about 50 pounds and was strong enough to lift a house. It might provide lateral leverage if I put one chain around a stout tree, tied another chain to the pickup frame, and arranged the jack in the middle so that it would bring the chains together when I pumped the handle -- that could work, I thought, even though I'd never seen such a rig before.
And so it did. Powered by my sweat -- healthful upper-torso exercise that swelled my biceps to Schwartzenegger proportions -- the pickup got turned around in a little less than four hours. We wouldn't have spent nearly as much time enjoying the sublime beauty of our mountains if we'd been in a four-wheel-drive, and I got wholesome exercise while the rest of the family enjoyed a pleasant walk in the woods.
That adventure came up during a later meeting with a dedicated Forest Ranger. How dedicated was he?
Our ranger district, like many others, used to put up
posters with the outline of a well-known plant and the
message This is Marijuana. When you see it growing on
your public lands, report it immediately to this telephone
number.
My ranger friend was so devoted to his duties that he put his home phone number on these posters, and told me that on every report that he was able to confirm, the contraband material had been duly burned.
During one conversation, while a patriotic writer was assisting this federal officer in the righteous incineration of forbidden foliage, the topic turned to whether four-wheel-drive was a necessity for motorized back-country exploration, or whether it was merely a crutch for candy-ass wimps who didn't know how to use chains, boomers, come-alongs, widowmaker jacks, spud bars, snatch blocks, and other devices that will gladly rip out your teeth if they don't castrate you first.
Generally, you're right,
he said. But
four-wheel-drive has a legitimate purpose. Go as far as
you can in two-wheel-drive, until you get into trouble.
Then put it in four-wheel-drive so that you can turn around
and get the hell out of there.
Otherwise, he concluded, four-wheel-drive just gets
you stuck in an even worse place.
Ed Quillen lives in Salida, where he writes two columns a week for the Denver Post and publishes the monthly Colorado Central Magazine (www.cozine.com). The aging baby-boomer has wimped out and now employs a '91 Blazer for back-country exploration.
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