While on a hike yesterday I found this car deep in the woods. I would like to know the make and model. Is there enough left for an ID?
Rear - trunk
Trunk
Front grillFront grill
Rear half w/ fender
More
In the woods…
… how it got there is a mystery to me.
Thanks
Sorry can’t help you, but it reminded me of the Far Side comic with the bears that come across the old junker in the woods: “Think about it Murray…If we could get this baby runnin’ we could run over hikers, pick up females, chase down mule deer - man, we’d be the grizzlies from hell.”
This photo of a Ford seems to match the grill.
Is that in the Forest of Niscene Marks? It looks like the car I came across there years ago.
My first guess is that it’s a Ford v8 convertible from roughly 1938. Looks like the Ford V8 logo on the hood and a rumble seat opening in the trunk area. Rear latch handle looks about right. I looked for pictures, but most of what come up are heavily modified or hot rodded cars.Here’s the best ones I found.
As for how it got there, those trees look young enough that it could have been driven or pushed in there after it died via a now overgrown clearing or unpaved road.
No, it’s in Bonny Doone preserve however I do go to Nisene Marks a lot and would love to know where the one you found is.
After checking out more of the same, I believe you are correct sir. Thank you.
This is going by memory as it’s been 15 years or more and I was only there once. For 20 minutes. 
As you go into the park, after the first big drop and hill but before the ranger station, head off to the left. I think I followed a small trail maybe 200-300 yards.
That’s really all I remember as I usually followed the fire road deeper in before hitting the trails.
Some of the current runners or cyclists might know.
Thanks, I’ll ask around.
That might be a Pontiac Arrow Head grill.
No Idea as to what the make is, although I tend to agree with the “Ford” guys…
As to it being overgrown… I have a 1962 ford, on my back 40, that was parked in 1978. Since then trees have grown into and through its wheel wells, lifting it up about 3 feet off the ground. I show it to my young neices and nephews and tell them that back when I was kid, cars grew on trees, but we didn’t harvest this one because we wanted a blue one.
My nieces and nephews will NEVER play poker with me…
Yep, it’s a 1937 or 1938 Ford V8 Deluxe coupe. The Standards had grilles that went all the way up and in '39 they changed to a lower but chromey-er grille.
As for how it got there, in less enlightened times leaving your car out in the woods was a fairly common mode of vehicle disposal. Any of the ones that were left in accessible places were long since hauled off, so the only ones that are left were the ones that somehow ended up too far off the beaten path to easily pull out.
What’s sort of interesting is that almost all the classic “cars in the woods” I’ve come across are of late 30’s through early 50’s vintage. I think this is because the scrap drives during the war cleaned out most of the previously abandoned cars and by the time 1960’s and later vintage vehicles would have been abandoned, they were actively cleaning them up so they never got a chance to become overgrown.
Is it a coupe or convertible?
Another thing people used to do was to push an old car off into a gulley or washout in an attempt to stop erosion. There is an old truck in the woods near our place which is on land that used to belong to my father-in-law. My husband remembers when his dad pushed it off into that ditch.
Intersting factoid: old car bodies were even used as revetments on stream banks back in the day. I don’t know if there are any still in existence or not. The car bodies were cabled together.
Wow, a '38 Ford roadster…That a pretty rare car. Even in the shape its in, I would carry it out of there and try to make something of it, if I were closer. I know of a web site full of crazy car guys that would carry it out by hand to get it.
