These Are Your Scariest Moments Behind The Wheel

Oh man, I’ve got a good one.

A few years back I found a dirt-cheap Wrangler for $1,500 bucks, the only problem was the guy needed it off his property immediately.

“No big deal” I thought. I hooked the trailer up to my Gladiator and headed out.

It was smack in the middle of a three day sleet storm-turned-ice storm-turned snowstorm. The drive to get the Jeep was no issue, but actually getting the Jeep and loading it turned into a fiasco when we found that the Jeep didn’t want to start. So, about an hour behind schedule, the sun had gone down, and the sky started dumping snow. The hour-plus drive home was pretty uneventful, until in the last five miles from my house, a car accident forced me to make a choice: Sit and wait in the traffic jam, or drag the Jeep and trailer up over a steep gravel road.

It felt less like a choice and more like an opportunity to do something cool.

The road in question was a one lane gravel road that featured a wicked 250 foot rise in incline over exactly a quarter-mile.

Now, townships typically plow this road whenever they just have nothing else to do, so I knew it would be a snowy mess. Now, between the Jeep and the trailer it was sitting on, I was probably dragging about 5,000 lbs up this hill. However, there were a few tire tracks heading up the hill, so I had some false confidence that it wouldn’t be too bad. At the bottom of the hill, I dropped it into 4-low and engaged both lockers, rechecked all my chains holding my new shitbox to the trailer. Off I went.

I took off in 2nd, and skipped to 4th gear, trying to build as much momentum as possible before the steepest part of the hill. About 200 feet into the climb, I saw the tire tracks go from 2 sets of tracks to a converging mess. Someone had tried to go up, and turned around and came back down the hill, and it looked like the turn-around attempt was MESSY. Still, I was moving along at a good 15-20 mph and had plenty of grip.

Until I didn’t. As soon as I crossed over the mess of tire tracks, the tach needle jumped, I started hearing that god-awful sound of all 4 of my tires spinning, and then my gut dropped as I felt the loss in momentum. The speedometer dropped to zero, and I knew I was in deep shit. I mashed the brake, and the trailer started dragging me backwards.

Down a one lane, twisty, icy, road.

With a ditch on one side, and a 15 foot drop on the other.

In the dark.

I looked in my mirror as I started sliding back, to see nothing more than a 6×6 inch square of pitch black, except the reflection of my taillights in the headlights of the Jeep on the trailer. As I realized I was starting to pick up speed, I yanked the parking brake up, and got ready to bail. About a split second went by, and the ice spot gave way to gravel underneath. Somehow, the whole thing came to a stop. The trailer was sitting about a foot away from going over the hill.

After saying a few quick “Thank you” prayers, I walked up to the front of the truck and grabbed the winch. I spent the next hour trudging through snow, wrapping my line to trees, dragging myself up about 20 feet at a time, again and again, until I was to the top.

Definitely the most harrowing thing I’ve ever faced behind the wheel, and I learned my lesson.

FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! Chronicles Live is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials, please contact us by email – chronicleslive.com. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.

Leave a Comment