Return-Path: Received: by inigo.Data-IO.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA15152; Wed, 4 May 94 10:24:09 PDT Message-Id: <9405041724.AA15152@inigo.Data-IO.COM> Subject: LOOK OUT FOR THAT CLIFF!!! Date: Wed, 04 May 94 10:19:23 -0700 From: li@inigo Driving over cliffs Can be Fun, given a little preparation, a little foresight, and a co-driver that is willing to urge one on for the Really Sticky Bits. Oh, yes, AND a '79 Range Rover with a 3 liter, turbo diesel engine, 8 inches of play to the rear axle and 12 inches of play to the front axle. Thing is that I didn't start out knowing that I'd be driving over cliffs. It started out as an innocent thing, where myJohn, being a happy, enthusiastic Land Rover type, took me out to the Northwest Challenge, a gathering of Land Rover truck owners. We also belong to the Pacific Coast Rover Club, as John's habit has included various 88's, a couple 109's (one of which is a 1966 109 ex-military pickup that we drove in today on with the top off. Probably one of the most battered, utilitarianly beautiful (O.K. UGLY), convertibles on the streets of Seattle..), a 110 with a thousand compartments and a truly *amazing* story of how it got into the US that included a dead uncle, years in an Alaskan field and a truly 'complete overhaul', and a couple of used Range Rovers. The club is really neat, filled with folks that own really *old* Land Rovers, the ones that resemble the Anti-Christ of The Gods Must be Crazy. Land Rovers weren't imported into the US from the early 1970's until just last year, so they were pretty rare here for a while, and all that were truly available were really old, beatup trucks that needed a lot of care. Sigh. I can't really do Land Rovers justice in a single missive. Anyway... The Northwest Challenge has two parts. One part is for the really rugged off-roaders with points for performance. The other part is an 'easy' rally thing that has some bits of off-roading in it. John, during the whole of our vacation, was saying, hey, maybe you should do the rally! I kinda laughed and then kinda nodded and next thing I know, I'm in line waiting to try out a teeter-totter in the Rangy and wondering just HOW easy was Easy? The teeter-totter was just two rails balanced on a log through support boards, the Land Rovers and Range Rovers would drive onto the tracks, and the driver would try to balance the truck over the log. John actually went out and lowered the idle on the Rangy for this, and they're all standard shift gearing. Turns out that with the diesel engine I could actually put the truck in first gear, low range, and with one foot on the clutch and one foot on the brake I could let the clutch out as I was letting go of the brake and the truck would creep up the incline in either gear. But with only three minutes to actually figure out the balance... anyway, I managed to float both ends of the teeter totter for a while... but didn't manage to make the time limit on the balance. Then we were off... Over the valley and through the woods, Over bikers we will go... Ooops. Wasn't supposed to say that. We were on logging and power line roads the entire time. The club's very, very strict about not destroying anything that hasn't already been cleared or made for off roading. The problem was that there was a dirt biking rally going on the same day that our rally was going on. The bike rally was *supposed* to be over by the time we got in, but, sure enough, they weren't. And bikers being bikers were just *crazy* compared to the Rovers, which, I guess, is the point. I am quite sure they had a lot of fun, even the one that bounced off the front of one of the trucks. The truck was coming around a blind corner, rather slowly, and the biker just zoomed around from the other side and literally bounced off the front of the Land Rover. The rider pulled the bike off the road and then sat down on the hillside, waved the Landy's drivers off with a "I'm O.K. I'm just going to sit a bit, but I think I'm just fine..." The navigator of the truck, somewhat exasperated, said, "Maybe, but we don't hit people very often, so we'd like to be sure you're O.K." He checked out, O.K. Tough... stupid, perhaps, but tough... and after seeing what some of the bikers do to themselves on the trails, I could believe the guy was just fine. The beginning of the ride was pretty innocuous, just regular rally stuff on dirt roads. We got to a little loose gravel, the trees started closing in, the dirt started turning to mud, and then we started following things that looked more like deer paths than roads. Not too steep, but steep enough. After a couple more turns we started meeting up with other Rovers. A few more and the dirt bikes started buzzing in behind us like angry hornets. So I pulled aside and let them go on. More and more Rovers started getting lost and at one point there was a bottleneck of about half a dozen going through some fairly windy, narrow, nearly canyon like 'roads'. A little further and we turned down a path under a power line. I could still see the road over the hood when we reached the edge of that one, and didn't like much what I saw. Rocks about as big as my head, that slimy red mud that was as much local clay as anything else, and a bunch of Rover tracks to follow. John kinda matter of factly told me how to get into low range, first gear for going down and yelled at me a couple of times to just take my foot off the clutch and not worry about the gas. It astonished me that that worked, but since I was in the middle of just *doing* it, it didn't frighten me nearly as much as afterwards, when I actually thought through what I'd just done. And the Rangy pretty much walked over the boulders that I pointed it at and that was that. Well, other than leaning into our shoulder harnesses as we went down the steep incline, and the fact that I felt a lot like I was riding a swaying, lurching camel. John was rather proud of the fact that I hadn't bounced the car once. Then it was up a slope that I would never have even attempted on *foot*, much less in anything on wheels. Half-a- dozen bikes buzzed around me, and zoomed straight up the slope, two didn't make it to the top, had to turn around and do a semi-controlled fall down the slope in order to try and go up again. After a few of those I looked at the JF. He grinned back at me and said, "You'll make it. No prob." So I put it into second, and sure enough. we made it, with momentum and room to spare. After that I thought I was home free; but then we came to this *cliff*. The cliff had this very intimidating sign that said, "Warning Dirt Bike Race in Progress. Watch for bikes!!" I couldn't see over the edge of the cliff even when I'd put a wheel over the edge. I panicked a bit. John told me to Back Up. So I did. I parked the Rover at the top, opened the door and promptly dropped it, as I realized that I'd parked the Rover at a nearly 20 degree angle. I just hadn't realized it was so steep after all the other tilting we'd done... I walked to the edge and calmly started spotting rocks. THAT was when I realized that it was a slope I would probably have broken my neck *CLIMBING* down, much less driving down. As John later put it... "I could tell when you were getting nervous 'cause you got kinda... terse." The good thing was that the warning sign was for the motorcycles at the bottom of the slope. The bad thing was that as I was heading back to the Rover two more Landies pulled up and the driver of the first asked, "What's wrong?" I laughed and said, "Nothing, other than I couldn't see over the edge until I got out of the car; and there's a race at the bottom of the slope..." They laughed too. I don't know why. I climbed into the Rover, hauled the door shut to a congratulations from the JF, and put the car into first gear, low-range, and took my foot off the clutch and prayed. We went down that slope hanging from our shoulder straps, and John talked me through it like talking a frightened horse through a fire. The diesel has incredible braking capability because it has much higher compression than a normal gas engine. We picked our way down, and it felt a little like riding an extraordinarily sure footed horse as it picked its way down a steep trail with nary a slip or slide. At the bottom I quietly put the Rover back into high range and waited for the wave from the bike race coordinator; and then took off down the now really safe and ridiculously *flat* road. It was an experience. Chuckle. It felt *really* good to know that I tried it and accomplished what I would have thought impossible even while scared to death by it. That was fantastic... Thanks John!! ---- Liralen Li | "Remember, science is talking about the universe in a li@inigo.Data-IO.com | way you can understand it, magic is talking to the aka Phyllis Rostykus | universe in a way it can't resist hearing." Neil Gaiman