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by Jennifer Reeder
 It’s
true – I wanted to be a bad ass. For some reason, my coworkers
thought it would be funny to have the vegetarian love-child let
loose at Avalanche Ranch, and I was going to prove them wrong.
So I showed up for Opening Day, and when pro motocross rider Robert
Settles offered to give me a ride on the back of his bike with,
“Are you adventurous?” (Does eating at the Golden
Dragon count?), I hopped on.
He drove – for him – pretty slowly,
and the only mishap was that my baseball hat flew off my head.
I could deal with that. But then it was time to ride shotgun in
a souped-up jeep to go rock crawling with Brian Schumamm, and
everything changed.
Brian, visiting from Colorado Springs, was
a self-professed newcomer to the sport, which involves driving
over “obstacles” like fallen trees or giant boulders
that sometimes shift with the weight of a vehicle. He was driving
a modified CJ8 Jeep Scrambler; he told me that only the body and
frame were original. As we followed our group of fellow four-wheelers
onto a trail named “Alien,” I noticed that it was
ranked a black diamond for difficulty. When we approached our
first obstacle, I understood why.
The obstacle was a steep series of those
giant boulders I mentioned. At the top of one particularly steep
part, there was a tree jutting right where the car should go.
To avoid it, drivers had to miraculously head straight up and
then veer left – but not too far left or they would hit
another tree.
Naturally, the first vehicle in the group
slammed into the tree and then couldn’t back down, or it
would have flipped onto its back like a bug. So other friendly
drivers in the group helped tie a tether around the tree to pull
him out of the pickle. Enough other drivers had problems with
that final bit of the obstacle that a bypass was cleared around
it.
When Brian asked if I wanted to drive with
him, or if he should pick me up at the top, I told him I wanted
to ride with him – I knew about the bypass. After doing
a strange contortion to get back into the passenger seat (those
tires are huge), I buckled my lap belt. He told me to put both
hands on the bar to brace myself; I had no problem complying.
When we got to the final section of the obstacle,
Brian announced, “I think we’ll try another way up,
and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll take the bypass.”
His way was aiming the jeep straight up. It lurched, wheels left
the ground, and I thought we were going over. But we stopped with
one wheel in the air, and me on the down side of the jeep. I was
sure it would roll if I so much as shifted my weight. Instead,
Karen the “spotter,” or person who helps direct the
driver through obstacles, came to my side and grabbed onto the
bar in front of me as she told Brian, “We can try to put
some rocks under your tires and you can back it up, or we can
winch it out.”
Brian said he couldn’t back up, so I retrieved a winch cable
from his glove compartment, and he got out to help the gang hook
it to a tether that again went around the poor tree. I heard one
of them laugh and say “Oh, you’ve got the camera lady
in there with you?”
I was really sure it would roll without his
weight to balance us, but again I was just being paranoid. Brian
got back in, fired it up, and we flew over the obstacle and made
it to flat(ish) ground. I have to admit that I had a huge surge
of adrenaline because we had survived and I wasn’t going
to have to find out just how crappy my health insurance really
is.
“Believe it or not, we were a long
way from rolling,” Brian said, though later he confided
that he once rolled a vehicle with his wife and son in the car.
“She wasn’t too happy about that,” he said.
For my part, I was thrilled to have lived
to tell the tale of my imagined brush with death at Avalanche
Ranch – but hiking is still my sport of choice.
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