This is the road you take to access the western end of the Wild & Scenic Rogue River, any of the private lodges along it, or the Rogue River National Recreation Trail which is 40 miles of remotely accessed river basin. It gets snowed in during the late fall/Winter and is sometimes closed when there are washouts that make it impassable. Because of the length and ruggedness, you want to check with BLM even in summer to make sure it’s still passable because you can drive for miles only to find that there’s a boulder or a tree in the middle of the road forcing you to try to find a good place to turn around (few) to backtrack to Grants Pass and take the long way: U.S. 199 to U.S. 101 in California, which is at least a 4-5 hour trip itself.
As for the sign **eschereal **referred to, the message is not overstating things. People do get lost and die on those logging roads. They are not to be taken lightly.
Pretty much any mountain road in Haiti. In the linked picture you can see the sheer, unguarded drop off but what you can’t really see are the incredibly soft shoulders, deep potholes and washes that intensify the experience. I have see more than one truck overturned and hanging over the edge. Most are so narrow that should two 4+ wheeled vehicles meet going opposite directions, someone has to get out and guide the drivers past each other as clearance between them can be as little as an inch. It takes about 4 hours to drive the 30 miles or so from the coast to the villages at the top of the mountains - if the “short” road is passable. If not, one has to go around and it becomes an 8-10 hour trip. And you DO NOT want to be on the roads after dark.
The most difficult part of our trips there are finding a driver to make the trip more than once. No one seems to want to risk their vehicle a second time.
Traveling up to San Francisco via Hwy 1. It was closed so rather than backtracking an hour we took this road. The road was in places less than one lane wide meaning that parts of my tires were literally overhanging cliffs. To this day I have no clue what I would have done had a car came down the other way.
Side note: Mrs Cad learned that when I say don’t look out you window then DON’T LOOK YOUR WINDOW. She would look down outside her window and see nothing underneath her.
Are you referring to the road that goes over the coastal mountains and comes out at Fort Hunter-Liggett? I drove that mother back in the early 70s when I was stationed at Lemoore NAS. We wanted to drive out to the coast and my then spouse said “Why take that long way (up to Monterey via 101) when there is a road straight across?” :smack:
On the map, it looked fairly straight, but hoo-boy. Beautiful country up in those hills, but the road quickly goes from two lane to one lane to gravel and keeps on narrowing as you mentioned. Then you get to the summit where it really gets bad. You end up winding down steep grades to the coastal highway. When we finally got there, we drove north to Monterey then back home via 101, for a total trip time of about five hours.
My story isn’t about the road per se so much as about the road and the time combined.
When I was in my early twenties, I drove cross-country from Washington State back to North Carolina for Christmas one year, by myself.
One afternoon, I was on (I think) Interstate 70, and my goal for the day was Denver, which meant crossing the Rockies through a pass. Thing is, a blizzard was forecast for that night, and the radio was saying don’t do it. But I wasn’t sure if I’d make it home in time for Christmas if I stopped early–what if the road was closed? So I stopped in a town on the west side of the pass and bought snow chains for my tires.
I couldn’t figure out how to put them on my Toyota Camry. I drove anyway.
The drive was beautiful: as I got up into the mountains, I went for about two hours on the Interstate without seeing a single other vehicle, nobody else being the damn fool I was. Snowflakes sparkled magically in my high beams as I drove at about 15 miles an hour.
It’s among the stupidest decisions of my life, and I am so grateful I survived that night.
I drove a coupled of times in the dark in Mexico in the 1960s. Even on regular straight level paved highways, there was nothing scarier than night time driving in Mexico in those days. Banditos were the least of the dangers.
Any road through KC at rush hour. I’ve made that drive a time or two when I was stationed at Ft. Riley on 70…OY the TRAFFIC Ftg Are you sure you are remembering correctly? As far as I know, the only paved road at the other end of ID-OR border is Highway 95 and except for the potholes and frost heaves its rather mellow. Could you have been traveling to or from Silver City or De Lamar in the Owyhee Mountains perhaps? Not paved, but a maintained dirt road that can be rather white knucklish for the unfamiliar.
Otherwise it sounds like you are describing the barely passable goat trail that 95 used to be going north from Payette to Lewiston through Hells Canyon.
The scariest road, which I have to drive often, is a roundabout. Who thinks these are a good idea in the U.S., fer chrissakes?? There was no reason (I can see) for changing this previously straightforward 4-way intersection into The Circle of Hell. Because I drive it often I’ve figured out how it works, but drivers unfamiliar with it/are nervous are wobbling across the lanes and cutting off cars because they can’t figure out which lane yields, which one leads to the road they want, and so on.
I would say that of every 10 times I’m forced to drive this beast there is a fender-bender. The authoritays recently installed a stoplight at each end of the roundy, which totally defeats the flow of traffic the roundabout was meant to manage. :dubious: