Scariest road for me was the old Jackass Ski Resort (today’s Silver Mountain) outside of Kellogg, Idaho. Today there’s a gondola system to ferry skiers up to the base of the ski area from a parking area just off Interstate 90. But back when I was in high school one had to drive up the mountain, negotiating a series of switchbacks. Very exposed with no guard rails nor even trees to stop you from tumbling all the way to the valley floor were you to slide off. The worst part was descending at the end of the day. Your stopping distance is increased, you’re tired, it’s dark and maybe you or some other driver is a little inebriated.
Just thinking about it gives me the heebie jeebies. :eek:
In America, I offer you Hell’s Backbone in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument area. It’s a bare, one-lane scrape off the top of this outrageous ridge, so beautiful, that goes a long fucking ways with nothing but straight down on both sides of you. I let my brother-in-law drive. I get crazy vertigo.
Maybe not the scariest in absolute terms, but I nominate the Trans-Canada Highway through Kicking Horse Pass, before it was rebuilt, in a Greyhound bus whose driver had just been pulled over for speeding…
I’ve done the downhill bike ride on the “Highway of Death” and took a bus back up it. Christ, that is a frightening road. There’s hardly any room to pass and the drop off is thousands of feet. I guess they completed the new highway in 2006 which they were working on when I was there in 2002.
In 2006, one estimate stated that 200 to 300 travellers were killed yearly along the road.
Roads covered with smooth ice - 3 specific examples I will always remember are on I-80 in late winter (March?) 1983 across Nebraska, on Queen Elizabeth Way in Ontario between St. Catharines and Hamilton along Lake Ontario about 7 winters ago, and on the E4 in Sweden driving from Linköping to Copenhagen about 4 winters back. Not bad roads, but bad winters and ice made them bad. And wind made them worse. Each time, after the drive I said I should not have gone.
And one winter on my motorcycle, north out of Mojave CA on the 14, after midnight and with heavy snow falling. The plows weren’t plowing and the snow got to about 4" on the road climbing up through Red Rock Canyon. I turned around and waited back at the Denny’s in Mojave for the sunrise, and the snowplows. Then I went north to Bishop. It was cold.
As far as paved “real” roads go, there’s one in SW Idaho near the Oregon border an uncle took me on years ago. Very narrow, twisty, built high on a canyon wall. A solid wall on one side and an amazing drop off on the other. Guardrails? Forget those!
Of course people “straightened out” the curves by driving over the line. Without a good sight line of course.
Fortunately not many vehicles. But several of those were dump trucks. Ooooh.
My uncle stopped and showed us a car wreck (one of several you could see) deep down in the canyon. That was where a friend of my uncle and a girl died. When a car went off that cliff, it stayed there.
I have fairly severe acrophobia. So when I visited the Mount St. Helen volcano in 1989, 9 years after the eruption and then started back down, driving east, it was on an excellent highway, but on the right there was a fairly steep dropoff and no guardrail. All the trees that would have provided visual reassurance were gone from the eruption. (I might point out that the reassurance would have purely visual, having no real effect. But then the fear was basically irrational.) I let my son drive the rest of the way down and sat in the right seat and closed my eyes.
Someone I knew with the same problem once circumnavigated Newfoundland. Counter-clockwise. It was hell, he told me. If I ever do it, I will make sure to go clockwise. Not for nothing is Newfoundland called “The Rock”. I wonder whether they ever had left-hand driving.
So I googled the question and came up with this:
Since this was from 2001, I assume that Rick Jay was not a moderator then.
The access roads to Chaco Canyon are pretty bad but not really scary. Well, maybe scary in the sense that you might feel like your car will rattle apart on the washboard stretches or maybe hit a rut too hard and get a flat or damage your suspension. Once you get to the canyon proper the ruins are amazing and it makes the trip worthwhile. I was in the area recently and thought about revisiting Chaco Canyon but I decided not to…I didn’t want to drive those roads again.
I started down White Rim Road in Canyonlands but didn’t make it too far before turning around. The road was actually in pretty good shape–the first couple of miles I was on anyway. But the weather turned bad and I wasn’t going to risk getting caught in a downpour on that road. There are stretches that turn to impassable muck when they get more than a little rain.
Proabably the road from Kabul to Jallalbad, narrow mountain roads and people drove like lunatics. I also had to drive the road to the Baghdad airport a lot when it was considered the deadliest road in Iraq:
Chaco Cyn: I haven’t been there yet but it’s been on my list. Your description of the road reminds me of another, the road to the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley – 30 miles of some really bad washboard (TripAdviser description-1, description-2).
And that White Rim Road looks awesome! I’ve added Canyonlands to my list. And I imagine those sandstone tracks, when wet, can get as slick as ice. You made the right call. It’ll still be there for you, for another day when it’s dry.
The Moki Dugway in Southern Utah. It goes straight up the side of a cliff for three miles and 1200 vertical feet. It’s a dirt road with no guardrail. And 180 degree switchbacks every 100 yards.
That sounds like what the locals call The Rattlesnake, which goes from the Snake River at the Lewiston-Clarkston area over the mountains into Oregon. I drove it in a 27’ RV and left finger indentations on the steering wheel. Switchbacks, drop-offs, no guard rails and no shoulders.
As for Chaco (sorry for the previous misspelling): no, it’s not scary, just rough as a cob.
I’ve driven on several roads in Utah that were scary in one way or another (I ultimately turned back on one of these, even though it wasn’t immediately dangerous, when I reflected that I was out in the middle of nowhere, there was no traffic on it, and no one knew I was there), but the scariest drive I ever had was going up the road to the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon, not far from Salt Lake City in Utah.
If you know the area, you might think “That’s not dangerous! Sure, you have to watch out for fallen (not falling) rocks, but it’s paved and well-travelled. What’s the big deal?”
Well, I was helping the new managers move into the ski lodge, and we only had six hours on the rental, so we had to do it in the dead of night. Three trips, up and back, with loading and unloading. This was before the Olympics came and resculpted the Salt Lake area, so the roads weren’t newly paved, and there were no guardrails – and there’s a pretty mean plunge off the edge into Big Cottonwood Creek.
Oh, yeah – and it was in a heavy fog. You couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of you.
So you had to drive up the switchbacks (including the infamous “Stairs”) keeping an eye on the edge, when you could see it, and while watching out for debris that might have fallen from the rocks above, and do it on the way up and on the way down. In your rented U-Haul. Lots of white-knuckle driving that night.
A couple from New Zealand come to mind. The first is Lees Valley Rd. About 10 miles of scrabble and gravel. Many switchbacks and much of it one lane wide. Had to back up about a quarter mile to let another vehicle pass. The other was the Crown Range Road near Queenstown. Was told to avoid that road, lots of accidents on it. Had no problems, didn’t ride the brakes overheat them.
