My family knows that I love to drive on back roads. I don’t mind a trip down the highway and I’m not afraid to drive in cities, but my favorite place to drive is on roads with a lot less traffic. It doesn’t bother me at all to drive in a place where no one else has been that day.

I think I come by this naturally. Back in the early 1950’s my father and a friend drove a jeep from Big Timber, Montana up the Boulder Valley to the mining ghost town of Independence. There, where the road ended, they cut up over the top of the divide and down into Yellowstone National Park. The jeep was narrow and they had scouted the route before and knew that they could make the drive. This was before the designation of the Beartooth-Absarokee Wilderness Area. They believed that a third entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Montana would be a good idea and thought that their route would someday become a highway. But at the time, they were mostly interested in an adventure. They got one.

Our children learned at relatively early ages that dad’s “shortcuts” often took more time. By the time they were teens we had changed to calling them adventures instead of shortcuts. When they took driver’s education, both kids had their teachers remark that they were especially capable driving on gravel roads. At that point I hadn’t taken them practice driving in any place with paved roads. I learned to drive in the open space of an airport. I thought that places with less traffic were good places to teach our children to drive.

Susan has always been supportive of my adventures. She got an early introduction to my style. When we were dating I took her up to Bray’s Lake, high in the backcountry. I had an older Ford Pickup and as we rumbled over the rocks a weld on the bracket for the rear axle broke. I was able to jerry rig things so that we could drive home, but the rear end had shifted and I couldn’t get the angle for the U-joint quite right. We had to drive below 30 mph all the way home. Sometimes it takes a bit longer when you travel with me.

So we had a bit of an adventure Monday and yesterday. Some even noticed that I didn’t write a blog yesterday – the first time in more than 7 years I have skipped. Our adventure started out in our normal way on Monday. We wanted to go cut a Christmas tree so I gassed up the pickup and ran a couple of errands and we threw a few jackets and a little lunch in the pickup and we headed out. The weather was good and the hills were beautiful, so we didn’t get in a hurry to cut a tree. I knew that we had gone farther than other cars that day, but there had been some traffic in the area over the weekend, so we weren’t making the first set of tracks in the snow.

There is a campground on Castle Creek that has Forest Service pit toilets so we stopped to use them. When we were ready to go again the truck wouldn’t start. In retrospect there were several mistakes made. We could have had more food and survival gear with us when we left home. We will next time. Perhaps the biggest mistake was that it took me a long time to admit that I couldn’t get the truck running. I tried everything I could think of. I checked the battery, cleaned the terminals, tightened the cables, I got out a large screwdriver and used the handle to tap on the starter and the bendix as Susan turned the key. I rocked the truck back and forth and tried it again. Working outside and lying on the ground under the truck, it took quite a while.

But we were OK and there wasn’t much of a risk and I kept thinking I could get the truck going again. Finally I took out a map and studied it. It would be an eight-mile walk out in country where I didn’t know about mountain lions. We discussed our options and decided to spend the night in the truck and walk out the next morning. We knew that we would be safe and that we had enough resources to survive. So I built a fire and we waited.

It wasn’t the most comfortable night we had ever spent, but we were not afraid. We did know that our children would discover that we weren’t answering our phones and would start to worry. But we had no way to contact them, so we settled in. To entertain ourselves, we tried to remember verses of songs and hymns. We went through the 50 states and named the capitols. For some reason neither of us could remember Jackson for Mississippi, but we got through the rest after thinking for a while. We named countries and capitols around the world. We did pretty well with North and Central America and Europe but we got bogged down in the Balkans and missed a lot of Asian countries. It used to be easier when the Soviet Union could be counted as a single country. There were a lot of countries in Africa that we missed as well.

The weather was beautiful for out eight-mile walk the next morning. By noon our friends had figured out where we likely had gone and they were already on their way when we called in. They helped us tow the truck to a repair shop and although we missed a few meetings during the day, I made my afternoon and evening meetings without a problem.

When we were married one of the things I liked about Susan was her sense of adventure. It hasn’t dimmed. Winter camping without quite enough resources suited her just fine and I didn’t hear a word of complaint about our eight-mile hike with short rations. We have wonderful friends who would have found us yesterday even if we hadn’t been able to walk out. One night in the truck was enough.

We are safe and sound and happy and healthy and ready for the next adventure. If it ever happens again, I’m going to have our backpack stove and some coffee along. A few packets of freeze dried food might be nice, and a couple of sleeping bags, and . . . and . . .

There are still some wonderful adventures ahead. And I reckon some of them will involve driving on the back roads.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.