Adventioneering

In the old days, I used to try to get beta on forest roads by calling the ranger or whoever I thought might know something. I did this because I figured it’d be good to know whether I needed to pack, say, three or four spare tires (road of bones, Nevada), waders (mountain loop highway, Washington), and how likely it was we were to die.

More often than not I would call up and inquire about some road, only to be warned off because of “severe conditions” that would be “impassable”, and then far more colorful adjectives about the condition of the road leaving an impression that the rescue crews would be finding our bleached gnawed bones in spring if I was foolish enough to try. Usually when I actually went to one of these roads, I’d find that it was class 2 graded gravel, you know the kind you can get a lowered Miata down, not the class 4 or 5 epic the ranger had promised.

Pretty soon you figure they are just trying to warn off the tourists so they don’t have to deal with getting them unstuck, but then every now and again the ranger would tell me the road should be passable in a normal car, and I go out there only to find hours of excruciating winching. In the end, I stopped calling, but I still look on the Internet.

We headed up to New Hampshire today to checkout, among a lot of other things, FR98. Partly because this is what the NHDOT road condition was: “Recent severe washout, may not be passable in compact car”. What does that even mean. When I think of a severe washout I think of something that can’t be passed in a car, or most trucks. So, we checked it out.

This is what I think of when I hear “severe washout”:

And this is what we actually found:

Thanks, NHDOT.