I’ve been intending a sanity trip for a little while, so 5:30 this morning saw me on the road to find me some peace.

I did too, gobs of it, and in the process rescued some boys who’d gone out looking for adventure. I figure they’ll have plenty of adventure getting their Jeep out of that tree tomorrow.

I was on the last leg of the trip (which I’ll go into in bits over the week, as it was sort of epic for one day) and I came around a snowy corner to see a couple of camoflaged young twenty-somethings pop up the embankment. They looked sheepish and I didn’t see a vehicle in sight, so my first assumption was that they’d walked past their truck.

Uh, no. They’d slid their Jeep off the road not twenty seconds before I came by, and sure enough, there were the tire tracks leading straight to nowhere and I could barely see the red roof when I got out. It had rolled all the way over, landing somewhat vertically, and a tree had stopped them. There are lots of trees up there.

They were OK; one had crashed his knee up but didn’t think it was broken. I didn’t either, from the way he was walking. I took them up the road to where a buddy of theirs was parked and turned them over. Sadly, I did not take pictures; those boys were rattled enough, and to have someone who undoubtedly looked like their mom pick them up was bad enough; they did not need to be humiliated.

But check this out from earlier in the day:

I’d been driving on completely frozen puddles all day already. Must have gone over fifty of them with not so much as a crunch.

This one had a particularly interesting freeze/thaw pattern going on, so I deemed it photo-worthy.

Sure, it was a little damp on the bottom, but it didn’t look bad.

That is, of course, until I drove right over the middle of it (d’oh!) and heard an ominous “snap” and then immediately dropped six or eight inches. Into what appeared to be sucking quicksand. Seems this had been one of those deep puddles. Oops.

I was already in four-high, so I kicked that mule into four-low, rocked it back a little, and bulldozed my way on out of there. Barely, too. I was contemplating walking in to Yosemite and leaving notes as I did it.

Dear Santa:

I would like a winch for Christmas please. A nice big one. Oh, and if you could see your way to have it delivered to the middle of nowhere in January, that would be great!

Kisses!

Cowgirl Walking

But that truck has earned himself a name: “That Ol’ Mule,” and not in any derrogatory sense either. It’s not that the truck’s stubborn, so much as it is willing to dig down deep and put some muscle in it when it matters. And it’s never left me in a lurch either, even when I do stupid things like this.

So that ol’ Mule spun a little, flung mud up one side and down the other, and gripped and ripped that damn ice apart and got me out of that hole. Four-low and first gear is a force to be reckoned with in that truck. I patted ‘im on the dashboard and said, “atta-boy,” and got out to take pictures, because that’s what I do.

Once I broke through, it looked like the ice was about four inches thick. Which would have been fine if it weren’t for the quicksand. Or my stupid sense of invincibility (is it any coincidence that my Calvin and Hobbes treasury came today? I think not.)

But I still want a winch. And possibly some common sense (I did have survival gear in the truck, but what a monumental pain in the ass that would have been, eh?)