Unknown Roads: A Cautionary Tale

This week, we arrived in one of my favorite states: Wyoming! To celebrate, we bought ourselves a big ol’ Benchmark Atlas. Armed with this highly-detailed behemoth, we decided to range a bit farther off the beaten path. It didn’t turn out exactly as we planned, but we had a lovely, wild time and learned a lot from our crazy/brave misadventure.

The Plan

We had a few days between work commitments and decided to head out into the back country for a few days. We checked our shiny new atlas, and the Medicine Bow National Forest maps and materials and headed out for Labonte Canyon, 29 dirt road miles southwest of Douglas.

Here’s some foreshadowing: We asked the Ranger in Douglas if the roads were bad in the rain and he said “Some of ‘em”. Okay. Weather apps said: 40% chance of rain then dry for days. We’d give it a try.

Heading Off in a Whole New Direction

The trip in was beautiful: green bottomlands, sagebrush and grass benches, wide valleys bracketed by rugged pine and aspen forests and striking pink rock formations. The road was wide and flat and dry as a stone.

We stopped to do some rockhounding on Agate Hill (courtesy of my quite out of date copy of Rockhound’s Guide to Wyoming), and watched an ominous and dramatically deep blue storm pass far to the south of us. 

Tooling on down the flat dry road, we felt that sense of freedom, and open possibility that we had been longing for. We ushered cows off the road way, snapped some lousy pictures of pronghorn and mule deer, and wondered after unmarked tracks heading off  to the mountains. Should we head up one of those just to see…? Not yet. We wanted to see how Steven did on the tamer roads first. 

We hardly noticed the wetness gathered in the dips in the road. Then, as we headed into the aptly named “Old Maid’s Draw” at the mouth of Labonte Canyon and skidded sideways in gummy mud. 

Time to pay attention in a whole other way.

The rest of the drive into was stressful, slow and soggy. The road had been doused by the storm we’d watched and (as we heard later) several days of rain before we arrived in the area. The dispersed campsites along the canyon road required a steep and muddy descent, which freaked us both out a little after our earlier skidding. (I should note here that, although we have many years of forest roads between us, having our home and all our possessions along for the ride, and a new-to-us rear-wheel superduty van added to our stress. We don’t yet know what Steven can–and CAN’T– do.)

So we drove to the end of the road, to Curtis Gulch Campground ($10 per night with pit toilets and water) and set up a tamer version of “camp”. We hoped the road would dry out before we had to leave the gulch. Lack of cell reception made this a bit of a waiting (and guessing) game.

We spent the weekend exploring the trail into Curtis Canyon, hanging by the beautiful LaBonte creek, reading and writing. We weren’t sure when the roads would dry out enough for us to leave so we decided to make the most of it and try not to worry too much.

More Rain?

A friendly forest ranger stopped by to say that the road should dry out soon. (Yay!) Then she returned to say the weather report had changed: 75% chance of one thunderstorm. Well, that night, the storms rolled through, one after another. Lightning, torrential rain, then clear starry skies. Repeat. …and repeat and repeat. 

Would we be able to get out? Seemed unlikely. 

The next morning, a few trucks drove into the campground, huge, Wyoming 4×4 trucks, all positively covered with mud. But the day was bluebird-bright, and we hoped the road would dry out enough to head out. 

We decided to walk the worst part of the road (the first 4 miles) to Old Maid’s Draw to check out conditions. As we hiked up and out of the canyon, we watched the clouds gather to the west: another bout of wild weather setting up above us. It felt like now or never.

Having baked in the sun for half a day, the gumbo at the draw was dry. But other parts of the road looked… awful. There were car sized puddles, ruts that had ruts, uphill and downhill slogs.

Dan felt confident. It wasn’t any worse than “mud season” back home in Colrain, said he. Which was true. But at home we had neighbors to help us if we got stuck. We weren’t sure how much help we’d get in Wyoming. (So far, the reaction to our Massachusetts plates has been either “you’re a long way from home” or dead silence.) 

But we really needed to get back to the wifi for work and our weekly family check-in via Zoom. In our excitement, we hadn’t let anyone know where we were going. (Don’t ever do this!)

We decided to try it.

The Way Out

Long story short, we made it. Steven performed beautifully in the mud and muck. I spent the two hours it took to crawl out of the canyon in various stages of “yikes bar” anxiety. Dan, cool as a cucumber, spent it snacking on his ever present figs. 

Lessons Learned

All in all, we had a great weekend and learned a lot in the process: pay more attention. One of the best things about van life is the ability to head off into unknown territory, to explore new places and go where the roads are less traveled. It can make you giddy and heedless.

In the future, we’ll be more prudent in our preparations: watch the weather more closely, notify folks when we are going out of range.  But we WILL definitely do more wild ranging.