Scariest road you've ever driven on?

In My Humble Opinion
61

There are worse roads in Yemen, but this one is one I’ve been on. You wonder what all the rocks are along the side of the loop backs until you see the boy running along the side of a truck labouring up the hill. His job is to stick the rocks behind the tires if the truck stallsMap

But for sheer terror the road going east from Poision Mountain in British Columbia towards the Big Bar Ferry has to take the cake. The surrounding mountains are in the 4000’ plus range and you have to get down to the level of the Ferry at 950’ in a couple of miles. I was about 10 and my dad was driving like a madman (probably to catch the ferry before it closed) along a dirt road cut out of the sides of the mountains. Huge drops on my side of the vehicle. He had one hand on a smoke, another on the wheel, and another on a bottle of beer. See the problem?

62

Whatever the windy mountain road is between Granada, Spain, and Marbella, in pitch black pouring rain so hard that I couldn’t see past the hood of the crappy underpowered rental car. No lights, no guard rail, often couldn’t see the edge of the road, sheer drops hunders of feet down either into a valley or into the Mediterranean, depending on where we were. People behind me honking and flashing their brights because they didn’t think I was driving fast enough, and no idea what might be barrelling toward us around the next bend. (As a near-native Midwesterner, most of my driving has been on flat surfaces. Snow, I can handle; mountains make me a nervous wreck.)

I eventually gave up and pulled over until the worst of the rain passed.

63

Srinagar - Leh, through a glacier tunnel - in June!

Leh - Manali, on an Indian bus, yikes!

Zoji La pass, in a decrepit taxi.

Sea Sky highway, Vancouver, as a hitchhiker.

La Pas, Bolivia, what do you expect from a country with 1 paved road?

Whitehorse - Vancouver, while the Cassiar highway was still being constructed.

64

A couple of roads that deserve at least honorable mentions in this category are the road up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and the road to Hana in Maui. The drive up Mt. Washington isn’t * too * bad for the driver, but the passenger has to look out the window at a sheer drop for much of the way up. And the road was not designed for today’s hulking SUVs, so there’s not nearly as much leeway for vehicles to pass as there used to be. The sight of a few inches of crumbling rock between your tires and eternity is not for the fainthearted.

The road to Hana is lovely, but it consists of miles of hairpin curves and steep dropoffs.

65

By day, the Taconic State Parkway is pure driving bliss, especially in the spring. The sun shines through the leaves, the road gently rolls up and down the foothills, and everything is grand.

By night it’s sheer terror. Beady deer eyes looking at you from all sides, fog everywhere, and no way to tell when the next turn is going to happen. All with only one lane to work with. It’s pure white knuckle driving all the way. (Though I’m guessing some of these mountain roads are much, much worse.)

66

As a lad of 13 or so, I went on a cruise with my parents. My mother the travel agent was always up for an adventure, and decided to take us to see some Mayan ruins. We docked in Veracruz, Mexico, and rented a car to drive to the ruins of Palenque. Another couple from the ship joined us, making the medium 4-door just that much more uncomfortable.

If you look at Google Earth or Maps, you can see the folly of this mission, and yet in 1975 it was so much worse. Not long after we started, I began to notice fields of crops on either side of the road. Mile after mile of dark green stalks/trees. Star-shaped leaves. Holy Crap!
Acre after acre of mary-jane, as far as the eye can see. Even a naive city boy from Tennessee in the 70’s knew this was no place for Gringos to be. I pointed this out to my conservative, strict, Christian parents who looked around and shrugged it off. “Well, we just won’t stop.” is all my mom said.

Between the trucks coming at us, the pedestrians that made us slow to a crawl in places, the narrow road, and the occasional flock of goats, I had my doubts that we would ever get there. Seeing the occasional gun-toting local just standing by the road cemented that thought completely.

Somehow we made it to Palenque, which was the first ancient site I’d ever visited. I’ve been to many since then, but climbing to the top of the pyramids and looking over the jungle is a memory that has always stuck with me.
As with such places, the locals gather to sell the tourists trinkets or food.
The only person with anything to drink was some kid younger than me dragging a box of sodas around. We paid 4 bucks apiece (in 1975!) for warm orange sodas, and they were the best drinks we’ve ever had.

We had to get back to the ship by dark or so, and I kept reminding my dad of this.
Forget missing the boat, I just didn’t want to be on that middle-of-nowhere-with-pot road anywhere near dark. I don’t know what it’s like today, but I remember thinking with every cigarette my mom tossed out the window, that if one of them caught, the resulting fire and smoke would make everyone from Veracruz to Guatemala high as a kite.

We eventually made it back to the ship, and that was how I spent my summer vacation.

67

Mind you, I haven’t traveled much: but my scariest road is State Road 26 between Madison and Vevay, Indiana. One side is straight up: the other is straight down to the Ohio River. That was a whiteknuckle trip for me.

68

What I came in to post, except it was the road from Marbella to Ronda. It was daylight, perfect conditions, except the locals were not happy about the safe speed I was driving. They would pass me on blind curves, where if someone was coming they’d fall several hundred feet to their deaths. (A fact not lost on the locals, who used this bridge to attack charging Moors and throw them over the side).

Not helping was seeing tombstones and flowers laid on every. Single. Corner.

69

I’ve driven in rush hour traffic in both the Bay Area and LA, and it’s only stressful for the first couple of weeks. After that you start to notice that the jams and insane lane-crossing tend to occur in the same place every day, and you stop getting upset because you know where it starts and stops.

I once rented a car in Palermo and had to find my way from the airport to a hotel on the other side of town, after dark. That was pretty intense. Later in the same trip, I was on a road leading from Messina into the interior, and it just sort of fizzled out after a while. Potholes started appearing, then got bigger and more numerous, and finally the entire road surface just sort of disintegrated, so I had to turn back. At one point I had to stop while a shepherd crossed the road with his flock. That was more amusing than scary.

But the all-time, hands-down, scariest drive I’ve ever taken was I-68 on a foggy winter night in Maryland. I went at least 50 miles where the visibility was no more than 20 feet. You could see absolutely nothing except the taillights of the car in front of you, and lighted signs along the road. It was like driving through a canyon filled with chocolate pudding. And it’s hilly!

70

I did this very trip in December! Veracruz was our stopping point for a couple of days on the way to Palenque from the Mexico City area. (There were only two of us in an Expedition, so we were at least comfortable.)

Didn’t see any of this along the entire route. Of course, it’s a highly-traveled route these days, and the narcos have to be much more discrete. You’d also be pleased to know that the route is much, much improved. From Veracruz city to Villahermosa is 100% pure, paid, superhighway. Outside of Villahermosa the state road is “improved” for about 30 km, then you get into the crappy Mexican highways I described in another post, but it’s only about 30 km or so, and quite bearable.

No people with guns, other than the Army. And of course we, being in an Expedition, are driving the typical narco vehicle, and so we’re stopped at every, single drug and immigration checkpoint in Chiapas.

71

Basically ANY road with large numbers of bicyclists.

I was driving in the countryside (Minnesota) a couple of years ago and had seen large numbers of bikes for miles. I was coming up a hill with lots of these people on the left hand side of the road, slowed to 15 miles per hour coming over the crest.

Found a half-dozen cyclists STANDING in the road just over the hill. A 20’ ditch on my right and a big tree. More than 20 cyclists on the left side of the road. Screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, with people scattering in all directions, because HELL NO, I wasn’t going to fly into that ditch and have them ride off.

In the end, no one hit, but boy did we scream at each other! For my part, I still don’t get what they were screaming about. They were STUPID enough to be standing in the oncoming traffic lane just over the crest of a hill in a 50mph zone. Club Darwin Cycle Club.

72

I don’t know what road it was exactly but I was being driven from Sacramento to Mendocino, which involved a lot of cliffside driving. At times it looked like our huge truck was on the edge of the cliffs and I was expecting to teeter over at any second! I was too scared to look out the window. A few days later we were going from Mendocino to the redwood forests but only reached the outskirts of the forest after a two hour drive. It was raining too much and I really wasn’t enjoying that cliffside drive, neither. I was scared out of my wits the entire time and seeing some maniac drivers along the narrow, steep roads was no help. It was the only time I’ve ever gotten carsick.

73

Up Mount Evans…at night. Two way road, and no guardrails. Denver looks pretty from that far up. I’ve done it during the day, too, and it wasn’t that bad. But definitely more traffic during the day.

74

Former Darwin Award winners? :cool:

75

There’s a part of the highway up through Franconia, NH that I found terrifying. The reason why is this: when you get to a certain part of the highway going uphill, there’s a perfect illusion that if you continue, you’ll drive straight into the side of a mountain in just a few hundred yards. Logically you know that you can’t believe your eyes and that there will be a way to avoid this - this being a sharp drop off downhill in just a few feet that you can’t see as you drive uphill- but it’s hard not to feel a sort of panic as you get closer and closer to the mountain.

76

I got lost driving in Philadelphia once, at night.

It was sort of like that Stephen King story where distance was fungible and unearthly creatures loomed out of the darkness, only scarier.

77

I’m waiting for someone to jump in and mention a road in South America. Some of those are weapons-grade crazy.

ETA: Oh wait. Someone did.

78

Twenty years ago, up in the Sierras, not far from Desolation Wilderness. A twisty, narrow, unpaved bit of scary pathway with a half-mile drop to the left. Then we veered off to the right and upwards over a slab of granite into the trees.

So I asked, “Why did you go off the road?”

The cheerful answer: “This IS the road.”

I leave the rest of the trip to your imagination.

79

The Oatman Highway outside of Oatman, Arizona. I think it’s one of the more notorious segments of Old 66 (such that it was bypassed even before the route was decommissioned, making it Old, Old 66), two lanes of winding and twisting and climbing and falling. I took the drive at night, and there’s basically no lights out there until the end of it when you start coming up toward Kingman.

Parts of California Highway 1 are pretty nutty, too. I took it from Cambria or so up to the Golden Gate (also at night, also two lanes). This segment is mostly twisting mountain road, seemingly always climbing, flanked by the Pacific on the left. Rarely enough straightaway to get much speed, and often not much visibility around the turns. Of course, the locals raced through it like madmen.

80

What makes it even more interesting is that everyone on the right has the right of way. As I recall, there are at least 5-6 spoke roads that empty into the circle. They, and everyone in lanes to your right, have priority. It’s complete madness during rush hour and collisions are frequent. Then all parties stand in the middle of 2,000 honking cars and shout at each other.

I’ve been on many twisting and exciting roads, including the old Lewiston Grade out of Lewiston, Idaho and the Rattlesnake, which also leaves out of Lewiston. I’ve been over Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range on a 12% grade, climbed over the rockies and the sierras, driven Crazy Woman Canyon in Wyoming, driven across desert in Africa, and driven roads that cars shouldn’t be on.

But the scariest drive ever was on a very familiar road in Eagle River, Alaska. It’s a 2-lane blacktop that goes out to Chugach State Park and is normally an easy drive, even though it’s unlighted. But one Christmas I went out to my brother’s place for dinner.

The drive in was not a problem. It had warmed up a bit and the ice on the road had melted. Unfortunately, a cold front moved in rapidly (as in about three hours) and all that water froze into a sheet of ice. The 20-mile drive out in a Jeep Wrangler without studs in pitch black was the most stressful thing I’ve done in a car. Creeping along at 5mph in low-low AWD, looking at all the cars and trucks off the road, the slightest touch of the brakes sending the vehicle sliding toward the dropoffs was truly scary.