Stranded

Been wrenching my own rigs since before I could drive. Between that and the AAA RV plus package, I've definitely never been stranded.

once - as a Sr in HS in '84 we flipped a car on I-25 between Pueblo and the Springs...that sucked

I was stranded last week.

Had to fly down to Texas for a funeral.   My flight got in pretty late and I was going to meet up with my brother who already had a campsite in the Dallas suburb where the funeral was going to be held.   Problem is that the gate at the campground closed at 11:00 pm and there was no way my brother could drive to the airport to pick me up.  There was no Lyft available so I ended up taking a regular cab.   Gave the driver the address of the campground and after a 30 minute drive we arrived at the address.   As my brother had described, there was a locked gate at the entrance so thought I had made it.  I then called my brother and he explained he was at the gate waiting for me, but he wasn't there.   It took about 30 minutes to realize that the cab driver had taken me to a place in another suburb 30 miles away.   The street address was the same, but apparently what looked like a gate to a campground was actually a gate to a country club.

This was in the middle of the night way out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of a wealthy suburb.   No Lyft, no Uber, and no taxis.   I tried and tried.   Also, I called some hotels in the area and they weren't accepting reservations after midnight.   I knew my brother could come get me as soon as the gate opened at 6:00 am, so found a spot against a stone wall and under a tree and laid there until sunrise.   Got a couple hours of fitful sleep on the cold ground from between 2:00 am to 4:00 am, but then the temperatures had dropped and I was shivering.   Mispacked in a hurry and only had a light rain jacket.  My biggest concern was the cops would see me sleeping under the tree and hassle me, but thankfully that didn't happen. 

Damn Ken!

Ken. if you were 15 you probably woulda broken in the country club and liberated a golf cart and driven yourself to the campground.

Never abandoned a vehicle that belonged to me.  Had a few long waits while it got fixed.

Winnipeg, Manitoba 1986 or so, I hitched there from Montreal and was stranded for several hours at many times, waiting for rides.

February in Canada is a difficult time for hitchiking... Very Cold.

>>>f you were 15 you probably would of broken in the country club and liberated a golf cart 

It would have been a haul down the north Dallas interstate system in a golf cart, but you are probably right.

The other time I was stranded was back in my Earth First! days out in the sticks of central Idaho.   We were working on a campaign in the mid-90s to stop a massive clearcut logging proposal right in the middle of two designated Wilderness areas through direct action while the legal stuff made its way through the courts. One time in the middle of winter, I went up there with another dude on a reconnaissance and logistics mission in a pickup truck someone had loaned us.   Snow was deep and right after we passed the one little hamlet in the area we ended up stuck in a ditch.   The little tiny town, Dixie, Idaho, hated environmentalists and you couldn't stop there without getting assaulted and beat up (seriously).  Yet, there we were, me and the other dude, stuck in a pickup in three feet of fresh snow in a ditch.

The locals and their out of town contract logger buddies circled us all night in arctic cat machines carrying rifles, while we just tried to stay warm in the stuck truck.  Had some good winter camping gear, but still sucked ass.

In the morning, a sheriff deputy came by and basically laughed at us and refused to use his winch to pull us out of the ditch.  "Against policy."  But he did call a tow truck from the closest town, which was way, way far away and ended up costing several hundred in tow fees for the tow truck to come out and pull us out of the ditch.  

Have had AAA ever since. 

Numerous breakdowns but never stranded.

At 16 my Volvo 122S konked out on a freezing winter nite ( fucking Stromberg carburetor again) with my girlfriend (the mayor of Waterbury's daughter) in the car many miles from home. The very 1st car to come by was a local cop, who after checking our ID's gave us a ride a couple towns over. While he was driving he radioed another cop who drove us another couple towns over before a 3rd cop got us home. I'm sure it was knowing Nancy's last name that got us those rides, but you never know,,, it was cold as fuck so they may have done it anyway. Thanks officers !

Another time I got stuck in some deep mud once after I pulled into a farmers field to sleep after driving up the night before to one of the May Day Festivals in Northhampton Mass. It rained like a bear while we were sleeping so we woke up to a mud pit,, not going anywhere anytime soon.  It was the year Harry Chapin played with a bunch of other great acts,,, Les Dudek being one of em. So as we're scratching our ass wondering what we're gonna do,, we see a dude on a tractor heading our way,, it was the farmer whose field we were in. He arrived, laughed like hell telling us he pulls hippies out of his fields every spring, and hooked his chain up to my 122s and yanked us out. Made the festival in time.

Good times.

^^^^  Much respect, Ken. 

People think Utah's bad, and it is, but Idaho, they can really take the cake sometimes. 

Just voted to kill off 90% of their wolf population. https://apnews.com/article/bills-idaho-wolves-environment-and-nature-lif...

Wow, Ken, what a hell of a funeral story.  Glad you weren't seen!

Jon Wayne's Texas funerals...almost as bad as your story....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcoJyvxlbCI

Hopefully I haven't shared this story in a past thread, but here goes...

Stranded in Italy in the early 80s
4 days left on Eurail pass to return from Portofino area to my homebase for the summer in Barcelona.... not much cash left, either.

Hanging out on a park bench figuring out train schedules -- I discovered that my passport was missing. 
Retraced steps, emptied my pack -- nothing. Maybe it was a pickpocket, I thought, as I heard that passports of people who looked Italian were popular. 
Never found out for certain, but I felt stranded at that point: How do I get a new passport and still get back to Barcelona in 4 days to not cause me extra expenses?

I tried to sleep on a bench in the little train station, but felt threatened by an Algerian man hitting on me nonstop in French. 
So, I slept on the beach that night, sort of hidden between 2 overturned wooden fishing boats.
In the morning, an old fisherman saw me and brought me a piece of bread soaked in olive oil. 
I had figured out that I needed to hop the next train to Genoa, the location of the closest U.S. consulate. 
Made it to the consulate and they helped me out -- even loaned me $50 for the trip home to Barcelona, which I did pay back, and then paid forward to other travelers.

All without an iPhone!
 

This is an almost stranded story, but then they all are if we made it back to tell others about it.

Labor Day 1986, I attended a one day festival called Ranch Rock that was held at Pyramid Lake, Nevada with a buddy of mine. Jerry was still on the mend after his first coma earlier that spring, and this concert was pretty much the first major gathering of the tribe since that troubling event.

Weir sat in for a set with Kingfish with his arm in a sling after a mountain biking incident, I think it was. Mickey & The Daylites played, as did Robert Hunter and the Mystery Band, as did two John Cipollina groups, Zero and Problem Child. Cipollina played with everybody that day, assisted by periodic injections of Vitamin B-12 I was told years later by one of the festival promoters.

My buddy and I spent about a week camping in Yosemite before we headed to the festival a couple of days before the show. The site for the concert was located on the Paiute reservation on the south part of the lake not far from the tiny town of Nixon, which was not much more than a double wide trailer where we purchased a permit for camping on the reservation.

Since we had a day or two before the show, we decided to do check out some hot springs on the north side of the lake that were marked on our road map. It looked like the road to the hot springs was not paved, but I was driving a Honda CRX I had purchased that spring, and figured that with front wheel drive and a manual transmission, we should be okay.

As we pulled of the pavement onto a dirt road, we noticed a sulfurous smell in the air and thought that the hot springs must be close. It was getting close to noon and really heating up outside to the point where there were shimmering mirages hanging over the roadbed. At one point, we hit some soft sand, and just like that the car was buried up to the axle. I tried rocking it back and forth a few times, but it soon became clear we were stuck.

We got out of the car and assessed our situation. We were about 20 miles from the concert site, we didn't have anything to dig with expect for our hands, and it was getting crazy hot in the sun. There was no shade to be had, but there was a large rock formation maybe a quarter mile down the road, and I thought we might find some relief there, so we started walking. As we got closer to the rocks, I thought I saw some people on them, and not just people, but hippie girls. We hurried up, and as we approached the rocks, we could see a film crew near the base and a bunch of young ladies in hippie garb posing up on the rocks.

Turns out they were a group of students from SF State shooting a video. We explained out situation to them, and they agreed to help us out. There were about six of them, and with the extra hands, we were pretty much able to lift the car enough to get us unstuck. We had cold beers in the cooler, which we passed around, and then headed back to the concert site, no worse for the wear, and with a story to tell, even though we never made it to the hot springs.

Ranch Rock Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtf_k-egjYse11HaU4ELUrjribGw_H-Rh

^hotsprings

One evening I was headed up to Crabtree hotsprings way up in the hills in Lake County / Mendicino Forest and got my Toyota SR5 stuck in the creek that I'd crossed many times before. It was getting dark and I misjudged the water level, even when following a Volvo wagon up the trail. Unfortunately the Toyota's air intake is very low in that model. Water in the engine...uh-oh. So there I was, in the dark, in the creek with the water rising eventually up to the bottom of the tailgate. I swear I saw fish swim by in the beam of my flashlight.

After trying everything, I just waited for daybreak when I could implement the plan I hatched up the night before. In the back of the truck I had an EZ-up type vending structure -- but the old fashioned kind made from detachable sturdy poles and a blue tarp. I took one of the hollow metal poles and and L bracket and rammed it into the exhaust pipe. And another I rigged into the air intake. Lo and behold it sputtered to life and I made it across the creek. On the "other side." That day I watched several other vehicles get stuck in that same spot, so I didn't feel that stupid. Someone told me a tow from that remote place could be $900 + (back in 1995 dollars).

After a few days everything in the engine dried out and I waited until the creek was very low and crossed back. And I made it back to Hwy 101 and headed home.

Two weeks later I was tooling around Berkeley and the whole engine exploded. But at least I wasn't stuck in the woods.

> we see a dude on a tractor heading our way

> an old fisherman saw me and brought me a piece of bread soaked in olive oil

As harrowing as the road can be, it's amazing how stuff like this happens when you really need a miracle.

Speaking of miracles:

My then 17 year-old decided to take a solo car trip up to Lassen National Park last winter break.  His destination: Cinder Cone.  He headed out early in the morning before we awoke for a there-and-back day trip.

Around 7pm, I started texting him for updates, but no response.  I figured that he would be out of cell phone range for at least one-two hours each way when he was up in the remote parts of the mountains (Cinder Cone is 6900 ft, about 3500 ft lower than Lassen).  8pm text: no response...9pm: same... 10pm...

I started to get worried.  Not sure if I should hit the road in our old, high mileage Honda or sit tight.  I imagined driving 5 hours to get up there to look for him, but was wondering if he or my wife would be trying to call me with the "Everything's A-OK" when I was out of cell phone range.

At 11:30pm, we received a phone call from a CA Highway Patrol dispatcher to let us know that a patrolman was with the kid, trying to jump start the car.  It turned out that kiddo parked just off of Hwy 44 and hiked 14 miles in knee-waist deep snow to check out Cinder Cone.  When he returned to the car, it was dark and he was soaked.  He jumped into the car to turn it on and set the the heat to full throttle; however, the car wouldn't start!  The battery was dead.  He walked to the highway and tried to flag down a few passing trucks with his flashlight, but none responded.  He started to experience all of the symptoms of hypothermia: chills, confusion, no chills, then fatigue.  He went back into the car and wrote "SOS" on the fogged/frosted inside of the windshield and started to pass out.  His wet clothing froze solid.

Fortunately, the Highway Patrolman noticed the car and saved him.  He started the car and Kid shared that he was under 18 and was not allowed to drive after 11PM.  Patrolman gave him a pass and stayed with him until he and the car were warm enough to return home.  He arrived home about 6am.

I felt extremely guilty that I did not try to head up there to look for him, but I'm not sure that I would've made it up there in time to save him.

We learned a few lessons from this event, for sure!

When i was a Kid We dad mOm sis/s bros um like 1974 Got Stuck in Blythe Ca in a Sierra Motor home rental RV - Snow storm going to grandmas house in Tucson az for x-mas  2 1/2  days later  we made it on x-mas eve

Holy crap, Johnny. You must've been losing your mind. And 14 miles through waist deep snow? That's crazy.

I'm not sure that this is considered "stranded", but my family has a history of going missing.

My brother got lost while he descending Mt. Shasta and spent the night out in the middle of nowhere (my other brother was ahead of him and was waiting for him to return to the trailhead).  Sheriff was contacted and I was getting ready to join the search party, when I received a phone call that he was discovered on a logging road and safely delivered our family.  At least he was not stuck up on the mountain!

My dad went on a solo hike in some of the most rugged parts of the Ventana Wilderness (Big Sur area) and didn't return home that night.  Once again, I was just about to get in the car, when my mom phoned and told me that he returned home.  Turns out he was bushwhacking in a new area (he had been exploring expanses of the Wilderness for his book "Lost Camps of the Ventana") and got in way over his head - literally.  He ended up sliding into a deep, long gulch and was exhausted as the Sun was setting.  He decided to spend the night there and made his way back to the car in the morning.  My mom forbade him from hiking solo from then on, but he still did so.

I don't remember ever being stranded, myself.

 >>most rugged parts of the Ventana Wilderness He ended up sliding into a deep, long gulch

happened to me night hiking with a 70lb pack on the upper Villa Creek trail

> anyone hurt in the wreck

No wreck in my tale, OCLT. Not this time at least. Maybe you meant Alan?