It was a cold night on San Joaquin Ridge. I sat behind the wheel, staying warm and killing time until I grew tired enough to inflate the mattress and try to get some sleep. At the back of my mind was the challenge I would face at sunrise: attempting to descend this rocky, four-wheel drive road with an engine that had tilted 30° and was liable to start scraping the ground if any more bolts sheared off. Needless to say, it was going to require a substantial degree of caution and a heavy foot on the brake pedal.
I had only been in possession of a lopsided Jeep engine for a few hours. While searching for a high-altitude campsite with a sunset view of the spiky Minaret peaks, two bolts that held the engine in place sheared off completely. The gear stick had suddenly tilted to the right as well, eliminating access to the fifth and reverse gears. Too many years of rough riding on off-highway roads had taken its toll. Luckily, I was only about ten miles away from a mechanic in Mammoth Lakes, but the first few miles tomorrow morning were going be tough, especially for a vehicle on the mechanical equivalent of life support.
The situation could have been worse. The last time my engine mounts failed, I was ten miles up a sandy wash in a narrow canyon on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park, far from anywhere. My friend Aurora and I had mistakenly thought we were driving up a seldom-used park entrance through Hardoo Canyon, but when the sandy trail ended abruptly in a bulldozed embankment, our navigational skills became questionable. Suppressing both Aurora’s warnings and my own better instincts, I hit the gas and followed some tire tracks up and over the embankment. We made it. But five seconds later there came a horrible grinding noise from the engine, and the gear stick shuddered violently. I quickly shut the motor off and hopped out of the vehicle.
I felt sick to my stomach. We were in the middle of nowhere, on the wrong side of a steep embankment, and my Jeep was probably toast. We faced a long, long walk back to the highway, and it was unlikely that I’d ever be able to persuade a tow truck to come this far up the primitive canyon. Feeling guilty, I strode ahead along the sandy road. Thirty feet away, I encountered a deep, gouged pit which spanned the width of the canyon. Even if my Jeep was still functional, we could have gone no further, for the route had been permanently decommissioned.
Back in the car, I tentatively restarted the engine. The grinding sound had vanished, but the hum of the cylinders still sounded weird. I tried backing up, but soon realized that the gear stick was crooked, and I could no longer shift into reverse! Miraculously, though, the canyon floor near the embankment was just wide enough for me to execute the sharpest of U-turns in first gear. I nearly scraped the driver-side door against the two canyon walls, but I managed to get the Jeep pointed in the direction of civilization. If the pit and the embankment had been five feet closer together, I wouldn’t have had enough space to perform the maneuver without slipping sideways into the open crater.
Aurora and I escaped the unnamed canyon four years ago, and I hoped this time that my Jeep would be as fortunate. Heavy winds on San Joaquin Ridge shook the wounded vehicle from side to side, and I wondered if my inflatable mattress would blow off the mountain if I tried to sleep outdoors tonight. The wind chill at 10,000 feet eventually pushed temperatures below freezing, but I survived the night by wrapping myself in a metallic emergency blanket along with the many sheets and comforters in my possession. And the bulk of the Jeep’s body blocked enough wind to prevent the mattress from becoming airborne as I slept.
Soon after sunrise, I put the Jeep in first gear and crept gingerly down the ridgeline, steering carefully around ruts and rocks and trying desperately not to compound the damage to the engine and its remaining supports. I successfully bypassed these obstacles, limped to an auto shop in Mammoth Lakes and scheduled an appointment for the following morning, which gave me plenty of time to practice traveling around town without the benefit of a reverse gear. On any slant, I had to remember to park facing uphill, so I could roll backwards in neutral before driving away.
Thankfully, my time in Mammoth Lakes was made easier by a member of the internet organization called “Couchsurfing.com” – a group of 300,000 people across the globe who are occasionally willing to offer accommodation to travelers and ask nothing in return but stories. This time, instead of a couch, I was given a whole guest room to myself, which made the financial impact of my extensive car repairs much easier to accept. And after three days in town, I drove away approximately $1,100 poorer and scarcely any wiser, but I had acquired new shocks and tires that would hopefully see my Jeep through its remaining years.
The first big test of my upgraded system came shortly, with a 7,000-foot descent down the unrelentingly-steep Silver Canyon after an unsuccessful attempt to hike up 14,246-foot White Mountain, California’s third-highest peak. The clashing of storms had trapped the summit within turbulent clouds, so I reluctantly drove away from the trailhead and gambled by taking a rocky shortcut from the mountain ridge to the town of Bishop in the valley below. My hands kept a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel until the road finally leveled out along the canyon floor. I believed I was safe until I encountered a series of stream crossings. Each one was deeper than the next, until the final ford nearly swamped my vehicle. I managed to keep pushing the wall of water ahead of me until I could emerge, dripping, from the other side.
Back in Bishop, I raised the hood of my Jeep and had a careful look inside. Water puddled beneath the thoroughly-wet engine, which still looked reassuringly level. And sprawled grotesquely across the battery case was a bedraggled and unmistakably dead squirrel. The waterlogged corpse must have washed aboard during the final stream crossing. Its innards were draped across the battery terminals, and the tail broke in half as I squeamishly carried it over to the bushes. Now I knew what a drowned rat looked like, and it wasn’t pretty. If I can avoid ever suffering the same fate during my future travels, I can say I’d be very appreciative.

Bryan is a 1991 Norwich High School graduate and works as a naturalist at the Rancho Alegre Outdoor School in Santa Barbara, CA. You may reach him mid-journey at foolsby@hotmail.com.