Newest Obstacle

Tom and I headed out our winter driveway on Sunday afternoon and discovered this brand new obstacle. The truly scary thing here, though, is that we had driven over this only 14 hours earlier coming home from an evening visiting friends in town . . . and you know the road had to have been SEVERELY eroded away underneath already at that point even if no problems were visible from the top. In short, we were DANG lucky!

You can see by these two pictures that the roadbed remaining is v-e-r-y thin . . . about 3" deep! Fortunate for us, we'd been driving the Forester around with two treated 2 x 12s on the roof for just such a situation. So, after laying the makeshift bridges across the washout and lining them up with the car tires, across we drove.


My trip across and back on my way to and from work (nannying) yesterday was a little more "Eeeek!" provoking, though. We'd gotten over 1/2" of rain Sunday night, and, as you can see here, there was NUTHIN' left of the roadbed. You can bet that I made sure the 2x12s were lined up juuuust so before I drove across!


The closed-in-the-winter-because-12-miles-is-too-far-to-plow "back way" is a-l-m-o-s-t free enough of snow for me to drive, and, I tell ya . . . it can't come soon enough this year! Because we live on a STATE forestry road, it is not maintained by the county. This includes situations such as this wash-out. The state does sub-contract to guys who come thru in the spring to check on and fix things like this, but they can't do that until road restrictions are lifted and heavy equipment can travel the road . . . and that's usually not until June. No joke.