Suppose the time has come to bug out to The Woods! Everything got packed, no child got left behind at a rest stop, you successfully negotiated the highways clogged with traffic. Nice! Now you’re turning off the pavement onto the gravel road. This post is about that last stretch of the journey; the challenges of the tiny, unpaved roads that take you to the private, hidden spots in this country.
Lest you think I’m making a big deal of rare problems…I’ve encountered examples of all of these, seeing three of them in a single walk of just two miles of a well-maintained, good quality rock road.
Mud Road – enter at your own risk if it’s been raining…
Here’s our accompanying podcast for this article:
Trees Across Road
At first, the gravel road seems fine; just slow down a bit from pavement speeds and you’re golden. Then a dark shape ahead resolves into a tree across the track. It’s a large tree, brought down by a recent windstorm. There’s no driving around it with woods on each side. There’s no pushing it out of your way, unless The Hulk is bugging out with you (and I mean the real, green one; not the steroid monster wrestler in a green speedo). There’s absolutely no driving over it. What now?
If you’re considering trying to cut it with that wire Survival Saw with two rings on the ends as handholds that you might have in your BOB…well, I humbly suggest you haven’t tried to cut real trees with one of those. Little branches for firewood; ok; but not tree trunks. You’d better have a more effective answer on hand, because right now you can’t go forward, and even backing up to the nearest turnaround spot is awfully dicey.
If you have a strong enough rope or chain, you can hook onto it and haul it out of the road. This works best if you 1) know where on your vehicle you can apply that much force without ripping parts off, and 2) have some way to redirect the force to the side of the road. Pulling the trunk straight back will often leave it still in your way. Using a solid roadside rock or tree as a pulley point can work.
The users of this road dragged this one out of the way. A big truck could roll over it, but not smaller vehicles.
The other option is a good cutting tool; good enough to cut up the big wood into bits you can roll off the road. It might be a reason to keep the good hand saws in the vehicle rather than stashed at your destination; or you might go with a chainsaw. Battery operated are quieter but smaller, so think about the tradeoffs.
Low water crossings
In case you don’t go rural much … when the road and the stream are both too small to justify even a culvert bridge, they’ll just put up a sign about ‘Impassable During High Water’ and call it good. Or skip the sign. Or you can find this problem on paved roads with bridges that weren’t built above the highest flood stages of the stream, and you’re trying to use the road during the highest flood stage. Heck, we’ve even found this issue on one of the biggest highways in our county, in a tiny dip between fields, when the rain was hard enough.
In any case, never underestimate the danger of water running across the road. There’s nothing that will wake you right up like feeling your car floating away when you thought you were just driving through a couple of inches of flowing water. You can read the whole story here (clicky). Flowing water is very hard to judge by depth and has far more power to carry your vehicle downstream than you’d probably guess.
The first thing is to never try the drive unless you’re stone-cold positive of the depth and that your vehicle will make it. Many small road crossings prone to flooding have handy depth gauges posted nearby. Having a high clearance vehicle lets you try more crossings, of course. Other than that, all you can do is have alternate routes or wait it out.
Soft shoulders
Even on the good gravel roads, the hard surface extends about ½ inch from the edge of the gravel. Scootch over to pass an obstruction or swerve for an animal and it can get very soft, very fast.
The pic below was taken on the edge of the best quality of rock road, and even on a ridge top. You can see how deep the wheels went when one driver got to the edge. That’s a ten inch tall water bottle in the ditch for reference. The big truck that made these didn’t mind the muck, but it would have been a problem in a car, or if it got much deeper.
Soft entire road
In Missouri, we have four grades of unpaved road. In descending order: Gravel, Mud, Two-Lane Cowpath (distinguished by the grass between the two sets of tire tracks), and Suggestion. The mud roads are the ones that really bite. Directions to some sites on our county include phrases like “Don’t come in from the south if it’s been raining” because mud roads get impossible/impassable.
Even the locals who enjoy mudding make sure they have a friend with a tractor willing to haul them out before they try certain roads. We’ve passed six different pickups stuck in the mud on one occasion (I did mention Salty was a good driver, right?…but luck also plays a role).
These deep wheel trenches were common, just inches off of the intended road bed. That’s a ten inch tall water bottle not really sticking out of the trench.
Disappearing road
If you’re used to government maintained roads, the rate of disappearance of unmaintained roads, especially in the Mud, Cow Path, and Suggestion categories, may surprise you. The pic below is … ok, Was … Two Lane Cowpath driveway just three years ago.
It took less than three years for the woods to reclaim what had been a passable road.
Walking a ¼ mile of this drive, I found trees of this size (i.e., too big for even a big truck to drive over), two fallen trees that would take a full size saw to clear that were completely blocking the way, and one area so washed out as to require a high-clearance 4-wheel drive.
There are also roads that will appear on maps but not in reality. I’ve planned a mountain bike route on our smallest public roads only to discover the farmer turned his section into a corn field since the last map recording. He’d also taken out the bridges.
Our Garmin GPS calls this a road. I call it tracks in a field. Unless you own this land, you really shouldn’t be driving down this “road”
Should you even be on this road?
Is bugging out to the woods a good idea in the first place? Salty and I talk it over in this podcast with companion article here (clicky).
Sometimes a prepper Should be on such back roads. They can lead to good places, both to practice skills and to hole up for real. The important thing is to keep in mind the fact that they pose more potential barriers to travel than those used to paved roads and/or regularly maintained roads might be used to, and to be prepared to handle those challenges.
Definitely depends on where you live. In the southwestern deserts, spreading some cactus pads on the tracks can transform a ‘two track’ to ‘forget that way – lets turn around !’ A post hole digger, especially water water courses across can also create a ditch that is very difficult to negotiate, as would digging a series of holes along the track adding more difficulty to travel.