I Got Stuck on a Rock

So this past week I was in one of my favorite mountain ranges: the San Juans. This is the southwestern corner of Colorado, and I had no idea what was out here until 2005, when I took a long road trip and ended up in Ridgway State Park, watching the moon rise over a mesa. Since then, this area has had a magnetic pull for me. Every mountain range or mountain-y area in Colorado feels at least a little different from each other — though maybe that’s just because of my associations with them — but the San Juans seem like one of the most unique. The mountains are big, steep, in some places even jagged, toothy: in a fairytale, a wizard would live in these mountains, a wizard who is probably very good but not entirely safe to be around. The San Juans were once volcanoes, though in some places the slopesides and cliffs can be so red they’re almost purple, or the color of red velvet cake.

This is also one of the wettest places in Colorado, with summer thunderstorms basically every afternoon, so it’s very lush. At my campsite south of Rico, the aspen leaves and evergreen branches were so green they were almost blue. I was working but kept getting distracted, standing up from my camp chair to wander around and look at — well, everything.

The only possible drawback to this campsite is that the cell reception is a little spotty. On Saturday night, I drove up to town to talk on the phone, and by the time I got back to my site, it was dark and I was tired. I pulled in headfirst. My plan was to get up early the next morning and go for a hike. It would take me a little maneuvering to get turned around and pull out of the site, but I would figure it out in the morning, I thought.

In the morning, I did not figure it out. There was a big rock in the site, as well as some trees and some mud, and in trying to maneuver around the mud and the trees at 5:45 a.m., I forgot about the rock for a moment and drove up onto it with the left rear tire. The tire slipped sideways off the side of the rock, and 1/4 the weight of the van came to rest on a sticky-downy metal thing that I later came to learn was the lower shock bracket.

The left rear tire was totally off the ground, so trying to drive forward or in reverse didn’t do anything except grind the side of the tire against the rock and make a horrible burning smell.

I was one hundred percent stuck.

So far, nothing looked broken, and the metal shock bracket looked like it was pretty sturdy and welded to the axle — still, I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to support this much weight.

The best thing to do was probably to jack the left rear corner of the van up to lift the shock bracket off the rock, then push the van backwards so the tire dropped back onto solid ground. But I couldn’t get a jack under the left rear axle because that’s where the rock was.

Maybe, though, if I put the jack under the tire, that would work? I tried it — but the ground was soft, and as the jack started taking on weight, it slipped sideways. Plus it just made a dent in the tire without really lifting it.

I got out my square-bladed steel shovel and dug down into the ground next to the rock a few inches, then I found a smaller rock from the fire pit. I put the rock under the jack to stabilize it and put a piece of plywood between the jack and the tire. At first this seemed a little better, but then the plywood started cracking, and then the jack slipped sideways again.

This was the point when I started getting very concerned. I don’t think a tow truck could’ve gotten me out: there were trees in front of and behind me. Plus, pulling the van forward off the rock might have done further damage to the stuff under the van. Maybe there was some kind of special offroad recovery service that would have some sort of hydraulic wedge thingie that they could put under the tire… but that might not actually exist, and if it did, it would be expensive.

I was trying pretty hard not to panic, to remember that I wasn’t in any actual danger, that I could live in a van stuck on a rock for weeks if I had to, and that I needed to stay calm and exhaust every possible option for trying to get the van loose myself and if that didn’t work, then I would call … someone? A crane operator? Gnomes with tiny sticks of dynamite to blow up the rock?

I needed something more solid between the jack and the tire, and I needed to make sure the jack was at a good angle so it wouldn’t slip. I went back to the fire pit and made one of the luckiest finds of my life: the perfectly shaped rock. I don’t even know what word exists to describe the shape of it — kind of a wedge, but in two different directions? I can only say that it fit exactly right between the jack, the tire, and the big rock.

Here I’d also like to note that during all these attempts to use the jack to raise the tire, I was breaking a cardinal rule: I had the van in neutral. This is not exactly a safe thing to do, but I was hoping that as I put upwards/backwards pressure on the tire, the van would roll itself loose. If I had the parking brake on, it might not do that, and my climbing into the van to release the brake/shift into neutral might collapse the whole rock/jack/rock/tire situation. I was using a length of metal pipe to extend the jack handle, so my arms weren’t under the tire and I could stand back a little, and I had the driver’s door open and was ready to dash for it and catch the van if it rolled free.

It took a couple of attempts — the first try lifted the van and it rolled backwards about an inch, then dropped on top of the rock again. The second try started cracking the rock between the jack and the tire, dislodging two small flakes of former magma. But then it worked: the van rolled backwards, the left rear tire dropped to the ground, and I hopped in the cab and hit the brake.

It took another few minutes and a 17-point turn to get fully out of trouble: the rock was still under the van, and it would’ve hit the gas tank if I’d maneuvered in the wrong direction. But about an hour and a half after I drove onto that rock, I was finally free.

The fact that I was able to get loose at all was a very lucky break: if the geometry of the rock was just a little different, I may not have been able to get a jack under the tire. If the campsite was on a steeper hill, the van may have rolled backwards into a ditch after I got it free. If there weren’t rocks lying around that were exactly the right shape, I might still be stuck there.

This was a stressful experience — like “eat 1/3 of a block of Monterey Jack straight from the wrapper” stressful.

I did go for a hike after that, though not as far as I’d initially planned.

So here’s what I learned:

Never, ever do that again.

Anytime I park in a campsite, even if it’s late, even if I’m tired, I need to park such that I can get out while half-asleep and only using three brain cells.

Even if I rarely ever use them and think they’re taking up too much space, I need to hold on to that metal shovel and the length of pipe.

God bless rocks.