For me it was an old mining road in the middle of nowhere in western Nevada. I was tagging along with a friend’s 4WD club and was way out of my depth. My 4Runner was quite capable, but I didn’t ave the skills or the nerve to keep up. We came a section of “side hill” that scared the crap out of me. I lost traction a couple of times and my friend jumped out of his truck and ran back to me.
“Hey man, you gotta go easy here–take it slow and DON’T stop! Otherwise you’re gonna slide down the hill and we’ll all be fucked trying to get you outta the canyon! You want me to drive it for you?”
“Uh…(gulp)…yeah.”
I was able to drive that section on the way back okay, but that cured me from wanting to go on any more 4WD expeditions.
A 2-mile long, uphill, unlit, unpaved tunnel in northern Armenia that had a broken water main in it. We were going the uphill direction in about 3 inches of water that was flowing back the direction we had come from. I went through it in 1999 so not sure if it is still that way today… probably not.
The worst “real” road I’ve been on was 211 on the California coast that takes you to Mattole Beach and Petrolia. Really bad potholes, narrow, winding doesn’t even describe it. You’d have to see it to believe it. I was driving a big old camper!
I’ve been on countless roads like in the OP (I live in the middle of nowhere, western Nevada). There is one in Red Canyon that is pretty bad. Steep, rocky, drop-off on one side. Went down on the motorcycle and gashed the fuck out of my knee.
The road to Mt. Chacaltaya was a little sketchy, but mostly due to the questionable car and driver. You can see some of the road in the photos on this site:
I’ll cast my vote for the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. I drove this about 25 years ago. It’s maybe 8 lanes wide, but it’s hard to say for sure because there are no lane markings. Basically a giant free-for-all. A crash at those speeds wouldn’t have been injurious - but I was driving a rented car, and I knew I’d catch hell from my dad (in the passenger seat) if we got into a wreck.
Probably a 1-lane gravel road in West Virginia, on one side was a steep cliff going down to a river, on the other side was a steep cliff going up a mountain. No guard rails of course. It wasn’t terrible if you were careful, but if a vehicle came from the opposite direction, there was rarely room for you to pass each other without one person getting their wheels off the cliff towards the river and the other person rubbing their mirrors on the upwards-cliff. Come to think of it, there were plenty of mirrors on the ground.
On the way back from the lake there was a snow storm and it was “fun” to go downhill with 10 meters visibility, skidding sideways around blind corners. In lieu of milestones there were memorial pillars with the names of people that died on the road, my girlfriend saw the wreck of a car down the side of the mountain near Chang La.
The road up to the Khardung La pass wasn’t particularly safe either, very narrow, bends that looked you’d fly off the side of the mountain and constant rock falls, not just rocks now that I remember, we came across a very dead donkey splattered in the middle of the road, four legs sticking up, that was amusing; the fridge sized boulder embedded on the middle of another stretch of road that we had passed by just a couple hours earlier was a bit more ominous.
But the views… to die for. :eek:
Some back road into the Kahurangi National Park in New Zealand. I’d been given directions by a local mate. It started off OK, but the sign saying “Experienced drivers only” at the bottom should have been a hint.
Gravel road, windy as hell, single lane, sheer drop on one side, wall 'o rock on the other. It got up to a 1 in 5 gradient. There were very few passing places, and more than one was filled with a burnt out car. By the time I realised how bad it really was, there was nowhere at all safe to turn back, I just had to carry on to the top. By the time I reached the top, it was snowing.
Oh, and I was driving a 22 year old Honda I’d bought for like NZ$400.
The park was worth it though. Spectacular scenery, and I walked for three days and saw fewer than 10 people.
I thought I’d been on some scary roads, but nothing compared to what others have told! … Except in my nightmares, some of which are like this trail in a Gary Cooper movie.
Been there, wish I hadn’t. They’re nuts, and everybody on the right has the right of way.
Other than that, there are a number of rough roads I’ve traveled: The Dempster Highway to Inuvik, NWT; the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay, AK; the Taylor Highway from Tok, AK to the border station at Poker Creek (very rough, very narrow, not maintained, sharp turns and plunging drop-offs). The worst was probably the road from Arusha to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. We broke an axle coming out of there. The road into Chako Canyon, NM is no picnic, either. Most of it is washboard, interspersed with sand pits.
And there isn’t enough money in the world to make me walk on one of those cliffside roads, let alone drive on one.
the mountain roads in Utah I don’t know which specific highway we were on but it was through a mountain range and it was a 2 lane highway coming and going up the the mountain and had stretches of absolutely nothing on either side except a 10s of thousands foot drop winding around for hours … the turn arounds were basically either wooden or metal squares bolted or supported by metal planks that were stuck on each side …
by the time we got to a lower elevation and a natural turnaround (which they made into a viewing spot that was beautiful )we were dizzy … and there were about 30 people who were the same … kids were carsick or upset and from conversation there were more than a few people who were afraid of heights who prayed to something to make it down …
What made it even more scary we were in a simple pickup pulling a nice sized trailer …
The A404 between the M4 and the M40, just north of Maidenhead, going towards the M4, just after the roundabout at which dual carriageway down from the M4 stopped. I hit a wall of thick fog. The fog itself was scary in itself; the fact that there would be idiots doing 70+ coming both the other way and from behind me made it terrifying. I edged forward at 10 mph or less until I exited the fog.
Chaco Canyon, really? I’ve driven that approach road from US-491 in a ten year-old Honda Accord, and while it’s a hassle - sand, washboard, gravel - I wouldn’t really call it scary. I guess you’re including it as a bad road. YMMV, which seems the mot juste.
Washington highway 26, east of the Columbia. Way back when, I went to college in Pullman, and at the end of every prolonged school break, the highway would be thick with cars full of Seattle-area students returning to Pullman.
One Thanksgiving, the road had glare ice on it about an inch thick, and fog so thick you could see about two car lengths ahead of you.
Traffic was crawling along, thirty miles an hour or so, and then ALL OF A SUDDEN my car was spinning around; 360 degrees, and we ended up on the shoulder facing the same way we’d been going. I still have no idea how the car behind me missed me. Insanely tense and grueling slog.
On a trip to Peru, where even the main roads are scary, we took a side trip on a narrow gravel road with a drop off of several thousand feet into a canyon on one side and a rock cliff on the other. The road was so narrow I couldn’t image what would happen if we met someone coming the other way.
As we came around a hairpin bend we saw a dead cow right in the middle of the road. I was sure we were going to have to drag it off so we could get by it and it would explode, showering us with rotted guts that we would have to sit in for the rest of the trip.
Fortunately that didn’t happen. We were able to build a little ramp around the carcass with rocks so our bus driver was able to creep around it. The bus was tilted at an alarming angle while he did so though (we watched from the road).
My seat was on the outer side of the bus next to the canyon. For the next few hours we were on the road I tried to avoid looking out the window.
The scariest road I ever drove myself was a winding mountain road through Panama’s mountains. Although it was paved, I drove it at night in fog so thick that I could barely see the white line at the edge of the road. Meanwhile huge banana trucks were coming by on the other side around blind curves.
A gravel-covered road over–well, in retrospect it was technically a large hill, not a mountain, but I was riding a horse I didn’t particularly trust, and it was skidding around on the gravel and I was terrified the entire way. It was in rural, central New Jersey. I’m not sure of the exact township.
My childhood memory is that a road up to Mineral King, California was very scary. I’m sure my mind magnified it at the time and wasn’t as bad.
More recently, like the OP, a dirt road somewhere east of Virginia City, Nevada. Narrow and tilted downhill; I was the passenger and looking out the window at stretches I would see very little sky, so that it looked like I was ready to fall off a cliff any second.
