Mountain Rednecks

A little while ago I mentioned Jeeping in an MG 1100, towing a big trailer with an Olds Cutlass, towing someone out of a ditch with a Mustang (with the tow rope just tied to the back of the frame). We've also driven a Mercury Milan all over Hell and back on washboard dirt and Indian reservation roads... at 80 miles an hour. By God, if we're going to break it, we'll break it during the warranty. My grandpa has hauled lumber and bags of concrete up dirt Cascade backroads; I know because I was in the bed of his El Camino one time for a supply run. You'd think he was haulin' shine or something.

Mountain rednecks may not always have four-wheel drives, but we'll act like we do. Cars can take a lot more than you'd think. Guys in a Subaru 4WD drive like little old ladies offroad. Of course, they're trust-fund hippies mostly. And not like one little old lady from Pasadena, either. Boy, she drove that Super Stock of hers. Give a mountain redneck that same car and he'll be going rock crawling. Give an average flatlander a dry creek drainage and a Volvo and he'll be parking the Volvo. Give a mountain redneck those same two things and he'll show you a fun day.

Remember this guy? I figured I'd give him another time around on the front page. It's just so....perfect.

If you're offroading on an impromptu cross-country road trip, the proper way to drive is, contrary to what that jumpy man with the clipboard told you when you were 16, actually with one foot on the gas, the other on the wheel, no shirt on, and the entire upper half of your body out the window. Even if you're driving a damned Prius, this gets you cred.

Like this man.

According to him, Priuses have enough ground clearance that if you're not all uptight and greener-than-thou about it, they make okay off-road vehicles. Plus, having your Prius towed out of a boulderfield five states from where you live is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This one made it through that trail okay, though, apparently.

Now I want to put a Chevy truck IFS with a four inch lift under a Prius, weld on a skidplate, do a mini-tub, put on 20-inch beadlocks with offroad tires, and take that to the next offroad competition just to see if it works. This comes from the same place as my desire to put a 426 Hemi in a Geo Metro, with Positraction rear and a four-speed close-ratio box and watch Corvette guys embarrass themselves.

I think I need professional help with this. I'm not sure whether that should be psycholog-i-mica-tal or someone to hold things in place while I weld. I'll get back to you on that.

You might be from Colorado if

A winter statistic: 98% OF AMERICANS SCREAM BEFORE GOING IN THE DITCH ON A SLIPPERY ROAD. THE OTHER 2% ARE FROM COLORADO AND THEY SAY, 'HOLD MY SODA AND WATCH THIS!'

For rednecks, especially those of the mountain trailer trash breed (you've met us, even though you might not know it), that above sentence is usually uttered while at the wheel of a 12-year-old sedan.

NOW: You're from Colorado if you'll eat ice cream in the winter. Are you kidding? I stock my freezer with popsicles first thing in December. And we're not the only ones in the Costco line with a jumbo pack of Orange Dreamsicles, either.

When the weather report says it's going to be 65 degrees, you shave your legs and wear a skirt. That's in the spring. In the winter, the shave-legs-and-wear-skirt point is 47. Shorts for guys (and those of us who wouldn't be caught dead in a skirt) is at a clear 42 degree day.

It snows 5 inches and you don't expect school to be canceled. No shit. Five with seven more on the way means get an early start, the school won't be starting late.

You'll wear flip flops every day of the year, regardless of temperature. No, we'll wear Birkenstock sandals. Flip-flops don't happen until late May; the snow will suck them off your feet.

You have no accent at all, but can hear other people's. Actually, I must disagree here. Colorado has a few accents, which no non-Coloradan can pick up. Mostly, you can tell if someone's from the Front range, ranch country, the Western Slope, or right up Jack Frost's asscrack on the Divide. You think I'm kidding. Spend a winter in a trailer in Buena Vista.

And then you make fun of them. Okay, we'll make fun of people's accents, but mostly northeaserners. "Hey, nor-easter! That 'sat-ah-lights' means snowplow. No, you don't get snow where you're from. You ain't seen nothin' yet." Sometime's that's followed by "Hold my soda and watch this."

'Humid' is over 25%. Damn straight. And this constant 45% we've been having means our swamp cooler won't function, except to give us new and creative mold problem. Really, the other day, I held a board meeting with all the various strains of mold that want to live in our bathroom. The toilet mold isn't getting his damage deposit back, the shower mold is getting evicted before he even gets to move in, and the mold that wants to happen on the ceiling because of the damn swamp cooler malfunctioning got hit with agent orange.

Your sense of direction is: Toward the mountains and away from the mountains. Is there any other way? March me across a compound hill leading into a drainage that will run 40 miles before it hits flat land, and I will be able to point where we came from. March me out on flat land and ask me the same thing, and I will get it very wrong.

You say 'the interstate' and everybody knows which one. Well, we only have two. Say "the highway" and everyone knows what you mean, too. Just give a number, like "24, 25, 285, 17," (ut-hut-hike!), and folks will know whether you mean Interstate, U.S., or Colorado road, too.

You think that May is a totally normal month for a blizzard. June's pretty normal, too, in Jack Frost's asscrack, oops, I mean the Divide.

You buy your flowers to set out on Mother's day, but try and hold off planting them until just before Father's day. There's any other way?

You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around your coat. I went as a fireman one time just so I got to wear heavy canvas duds. Another time I went as Chewbacca just so I could wear fur to stay warm. We only had three dry Halloweens when I was growing up, and one of then was 17 degrees.

You know what the Continental Divide is. Who doesn't?

You don't think Coors beer is that big a deal. They bought the whole town, of course it's a big deal. It just isn't any good from a beer or supply chain standpoint.

You went to Casa Bonita as a kid, and as an adult. And take every visitor there, too.

You've gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities. Can you say "Jeeping in an MG 1100?" How about "Towing a big-ass trailer up a dirt mountain road with a '93 Olsmobile Cutlass" Been there, done that. How about "Towed someone out of a mild Colorado ditch with an '83 Mustang?" Hell yeah. I always say, if you get stuck anywhere in Colorado, wait and a local will help you. If you get stuck within 90 miles of Denver, call me, we'll get you out.

You always know the elevation of where you are. 5373 feet.

You wake up to a beautiful, 80 degree day and you wonder if it's going to snow tomorrow. Or thundersnow. I didn't know that was possible until it happened. I thought the Reds had attacked. With a nuke.

You don't care that some company renamed it, the Broncos still play at Mile High.

Every movie theater has military and student discounts. Seriously, is that abnormal?

Everybody wears jeans to church. Some folks ride quads to church. I saw one feller ride a horse one time.

You actually know that ** South Park ** is a real place not just a show on TV. You also know that the really weird people are just over the pass on either side of South Park.

You know what a 'trust fund hippy' is, and you know its natural habitat is Boulder. Drinking Fat Tire Ale and saving the whales.

But where else do you have such a Postcard view from you front/back porch! Somewhere that's NOT Boulder.

You know you're talking to a fellow Coloradoan when they call it Elitches, not Six Flags. Fuck Six Flags. It will always be Elitch's, (both spellings are acceptable), and not to see Elitch's is not to see Denver.

A bear on your front porch doesn't bother you. It does tend to bother other people, though, so you'll probably throw a firecracker at it. Tom did that once, the bear jumped straight up out of his dumpster, hit the ground running, and never came back.

Your two favorite teams are the Broncos and whoever is beating the crap out of the Raiders. Except last season. The Broncos were' not on that list last year, but Elam was. Trading him was the dumbest thing that franchise has ever done.

When people out East tell you they have mountains in their state, too, you just laugh. They're hills. That's why y'all are called hillbillies. We've got hillbillies here, too, but here, they live in the FOOThills, and the real dangerous moonshiners, hunters, and general backwoods boys live up past the foothills, in the front or second range of the MOUNTAINS.

You go anywhere else on the planet and the air feels 'sticky' and you notice the sky is no longer blue. It's been sticky around here lately, too. Wouldn't it suck if the overall change in climate patterns that "global warming" is going to cause put us smack dab in the middle of a cold, wet zone?

Redneck sports

Give me a baseball bat and a baseball, both about three inches in diameter, and I can't get them to connect to save my life. Give me a broom handle and a soda can, and suddenly I have a .900 batting average. I don't get it either.

So I'm building a sandboard. I've modeled it more off of the "snurfer" than modern snowboards, but it has elemets of both. Not having bindings that I can fit my workboots in and not having snowboard boots, I decided to bolt the uppers from a pair of inline skates to the board. This way or may not work, I'll find out sometime between tomorrow and Sunday, when we go to Alamosa and I actually get it on the sand. So all ya'll ain't gonna hear from me for a while. As a matter of fact, I hope the dunes are as big as I remember them. That could be a dealbreaker.

As for the truck and the wheels from the red wagon, I have taken the regular wheels off of a longboard-type skateboard that I have in order to be less likely to be tempted to try something that will result in more road rash. What I really need is a mountainboard. Those things are cool, and much more useful and fun than regular skateboards. Plus, they don't have the same talent that skateboards have to almost break my neck.

The plan is to put the wheels from the wagon onto the longboard deck, bolt on some straps like a mountainboard of wakeboard would have, and do the land version of wakeboarding. It is really a pastime in the flatter areas of the country, to get dragged by your buddy's truck as you stand on something with wheels. In fact, I don't even need a truck, I just need two people: one to watch me from the vehicle and make sure I'm alright, and the other one to drive the vehicle. Motorcycle, truck, car, El Camino, I don't care.

Alternately, if I can figure out how to work and obtain a kite, I intend to kitesurf on land with it. That would be fun beyond words, and would even be worth driving out to the flatlands to do it. Or even hilly open space.

If you're in a hole...

...Stop digging. Don't get me wrong, I loved Boyd Coddington's taste(rest his soul) and thought he was a good, salt-of-the-earth man (ironic, no?), but this guy did everything ass-backwards when he went out to Bonneville.

For the past 40 years, there has been a mining operation going on near the Bonneville racecourses, where the miners collect the water runoff from the flats and direct it into huge setlling ponds, collecting potash from it. Then the salt would just sit there, when it should have been sitting out on the racecourses, building up a foot and a half thick. At one point, there were just a couple of inches of salt on the Flats. That's nowhere near enough to have Speed Week. That's the recipe for Stuck in the Mud Week.

Salt, when it has been wetted and allowed to dry, forms a surface very similar to concrete, or maybe plaster of paris. Anyone who went to Southmoor while they still had the Upper Field is familiar with this--it was dirt, but practically concrete. Out on the Slat Flats, though, the mud underneath the salt is frikkin' quicksand, just about. We can't have vehicles breaking through to that at five miles an hour, let alone 200.

Starting in 1997, Save the Salt was started; a program where the water from the holding tanks would be pumped back out over the Flats. In other words, they been repaving.

Of course, if rain hits right before Speed Week or the salt pumping hasn't deposited enough, the courses and the whole shebang have to be moved somewhere else.

You standin' on unstable ground, boy.

Here's the story of Boyd Coddington's visit in 2007, as published on the Bonneville website, http://www.saltflats.com/

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Bonneville can be a tough place.
As you may have heard, at SpeedWeek 2007, Boyd Coddington star of TV’s American Hotrod show had a very tough couple of days. Boyd and his wife Jo were running a beautiful roadster, hoping for a class record, with a full TVcrew recording their racing efforts. As you will read, things went from bad to much much worse for the Coddington crew.
Ron Christenson (long time USFRA volunteer) was working the Speedweek 2007 Event in his usual position as Radio Announcer on 1610 AM radio announcing the event. He captured these photos and this inside story from his ringside seat.

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Photos and Narrative by Ron Christensen

Thursday afternoon the Boyd Coddington race team, complete with a film crew for Speed TV's "American Hotrodder" was heading from the starting line to the 3- Mile after Jo Coddington (Boyd's wife) had just spun their roadster at about 180- MPH (and come really close to backing into the Timing Slips stand at great speed.) The motorhome headed for the return road just as it was supposed to do. Unfortunately it broke through the thin salt (the SpeedWeek tracks had to be relocated to a risky area after the rains a couple of weeks before the event). We normally wouldn't have been driving in this area as it is quite a distance east of the usual location of the track.

With the "American Hotrodder" film crew shooting away, the Coddington group tried to get the motorhome free but it had sunk in up to the axle and even with lots of digging it would not budge. So they called a tow truck to come and pull them out. The mood of the Coddington crew was sort of giddy . . . the seriousness of the predicament hadn't seem to have sunk in nearly as well as the motorhome had. They were all standing around laughing and drinking beers, having a great time.
Two vehicles (a very large wrecker and a flatbed) arrived about two hours later like the Lone Ranger and Tonto to the rescue . . . . The Coddington crew was certain it would be out of there in minutes and heading back to the casino in Wendover for dinner, gambling and more beers! Plans didn't quite work out as hoped as both rescue vehicles promptly got stuck not far from the motorhome. It should have been obvious that if the motorhome broke through, a big heavy wrecker didn't stand a chance. So there were now three stuck vehicles. The wrecker crews were heard to say something like "We'll just get 'Big Blue' in here . . . no problem!" More beers came out and the party continued.

At about 6:00 PM, I had to leave the salt about that time to go to the workers dinner at the Nugget and a party at an old friend's home in Wendover.
When I returned at about 10:30 p.m. to my radio trailer to spend the night I noticed there were lights in the area of the motorhome so I drove over there. Things had gone from bad to critical at the scene. The Coddington crew's mood had made a 180 degree change from when I left. They looked very sullen and an air of gloom hung over the group. I then surveyed the scene. "Big Blue" (the wrecker that would save the day) had arrived after I left and had been trying to pull the big yellow wrecker from the nice soft mud into which it had become so comfortable. The yellow wrecker which had been sitting so peacefully with the salt surface firmly against the undercarriage when I left was now at about a 40 degree angle with mud coming up about 6 feet to the door of the cab on the left side. It was wedged firmly into the landscape with its right side tires about a foot off the ground and about 100 feet of 4-foot deep trench indicating where Big Blue had dragged it in an attempt to free it from the clutches of the desert.

The dragging had only gotten it deeper into the mud. And to make matters even worse, Big Blue had gotten itself in about the same situation, sinking into the mud about 4 feet as it attempted to pull the yellow wrecker free. And in a last ditch effort to get the motorhome out it had managed to damage its boom winch and a tow cable was now stretched tight like a huge steel guitar string between it and the motorhome. The damaged winch would not release and they could not remove the cable. It was about 3 feet above the salt and about 1050 feet long which created quite a hazard. One of the Coddington crewmen had borrowed some orange cones from the race course return road to mark off the cable so no one would drive into it. Unfortunately one of their own crew drove their mini van right into it as he attempted to drive between the cones!

I struggled not to laugh at this comedy as it unfolded. Another pair of cables stretched between Big Blue and the yellow wrecker. Big Blue was sitting at an odd angle with its right rear wheels buried firmly in the mud. It looked a dog cleaning its backside on the carpet. Somehow they had managed to free the flatbed which they had backed in to try to free Big Blue and it too had become stuck again, this time much worse than before. The three rescue vehicles were in a nice tidy row, half buried and held in the firm grip of the clay-like mud that lies just below the surface of the salt. The scene resembled some sort of elephant hunt with three slain carcasses lying dead on the playa. The motorhome sat unmoved in the same spot it had found itself in when it started this fiasco, no doubt chuckling to itself at the mess it had created!

The muddied and sullen Coddington crew divided up and some of them stayed in the motorhome while another group left in the mini van with a fresh cable burn on its nose. It was pitch black out with no moon and they had no idea how to find their way back to the access road. I explained that they just needed to drive to the dike behind the starting line then follow it around until they encountered the row of cones that marked the route to the access road. I returned to my radio position at the starting line where I started to prepare the Cherokee Hotel for the night. I watched as the Coddington crew left in the mini van and drove past the starting lines then proceeded to head off in a northerly direction instead of following the dike to the west as I suggested. I could imagine them driving off into the darkness and getting stuck in the muddy area towards the mountains. A perfect end to their evening!

I decided to rescue them from another disaster and I chased them down in the Jeep then guided them to the coned route to the access road. They still had the water hazard at the end of the access road to negotiate. I explained that they MUST keep the relocated row of cones to the immediate right of their vehicle at all times as there were now 3 to 4 foot deep holes hidden under the surface of the water if they ventured off the marked path. I returned to my trailer and wished them luck.

The next morning the scene at the motorhome was revealed in all its glory! You can see the carnage in the photos. I wonder how or if they will "replace their divots." About 10:00 a.m. ANOTHER huge wrecker arrived. This one was even bigger than the big yellow one and it was equipped with a third axel on the back. They carefully backed it up and removed the motorhome, the flatbed, then "Big Blue." When I finally left they were still working on pulling the big yellow wrecker.

Your friends at the USFRA encourage you to be careful out there. Bonneville can be a very tough place!

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These folks have obviously never lived in real snow country. Treat the mud like deep snow, respect it, and it might not swallow your truck. Trouble is, unlike snow, mud doesn't go away by July. I mentioned a while back that if you get stuck in Colorado, wait and we'll dig you out, it's what we live for in the wintertime. Well, that and summer. That's really what we're doing, filling time while we wait for summer. Anyway, after all of this, we coulda gotten these boys out of that jam, without the huge three-axle wrecker and all the to-do. Of course, the mountain contingent might not dig 'em out, they were just so daggum stupid. But you can't just throw big iron at a break-through problem, just like you can't just floor it on the salt. One'll eat your truck, and the other will eat your tires.

Merry racing!

The proper way to drive

If you're offroading on an impromptu cross-country road trip, the proper way to drive is, contrary to what that jumpy man with the clipboard told you when you were 16, actually with one foot on the gas, the other on the wheel, no shirt on, and the entire upper half of your body out the window. Even if you're driving a damned Prius, this gets you cred.

Like this man.

According to him, Priuses have enough ground clearance that if you're not all uptight and greener-than-thou about it, they make okay off-road vehicles. Plus, having your Prius towed out of a boulderfield five states from where you live is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This one made it through that trail okay, though, apparently.

Now I want to put a Chevy truck IFS with a four inch lift under a Prius, weld on a skidplate, do a mini-tub, put on 20-inch beadlocks with offroad tires, and take that to the next offroad competition just to see if it works. This comes from the same place as my desire to put a 426 Hemi in a Geo Metro, with Positraction rear and a four-speed close-ratio box and watch Corvette guys embarrass themselves.

I think I need professional help with this. I'm not sure whether that should be psycholog-i-mica-tal or someone to hold things in place while I weld. I'll get back to you on that.