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Moscow Mountain

First off, let me apologize for the lack of any pictures, but this residency suffers from a lack of professional grade digital cameras and this whole story took place around midnight.

Moscow Mountain is basically a tall hill in the rolling wheat fields of Idaho. It is technically a recreation area made up of public and privately owned forest lands. From looking at topographical maps one day, Vladmir Putin discovered that there are several radio towers located on Moscow Mountain that provide radio service to both Washington and Idaho. Even better yet, at one point there was a fire lookout tower located there. No further information was available because for some reason there are no Terraserver satellite photos of this region of Idaho...

So with the logistical assistance of the Centralia Nerve Center, an operation was planned for one weekend in October of 2001. Vladmir and another unspecified contract operative set out for Moscow, ID around 11PM. Very few supplies were loaded up including a laptop with map program and a 2AA maglite and a 4C Pelican M-10 flashlight. The maps said the road was paved, so we took a full size car out for the deployment.

Once we got outside the city limits of Moscow and headed towards our destination, we quickly realized the road we were searching for was a small gravel road in the middle of a potato field. What the fuck? We're in a brand new car, but you only live once, so we went for it.

The road twisted up switchbacks until we reached a homemade plywood sign stating "Moscow Mountain Recreation Area." At this point the road turned to dirt, with large wheel ruts. Not thinking logically, we continued up the hill. The map on the laptop didn't really correspond with the roads in real life, but we weren't concerned yet. We continued driving on and on, and the road condition kept getting worse and worse.

After passing a group of rednecks with their pickups circled around a bonfire drinking beer, we got a little spooked. But we kept driving, hoping that they were too drunk to care about us. Of course we got a little lost, and should have brought along a GPS, but too late now. In fact, I'm not sure where we were, or if we were even on the right road. All I know is that we were now about 24 miles from the nearest paved road. But visions of fire lookouts and radio repeater towers kept us going, clouding our vision, impairing our judgement...

The road continued to worsen. Large humps for rain runoff drainage made navigating difficult. What these consisted of was a large hump, and on the uphill side, a ditch running off the road. The rainwater would run down and collect in these and keep the road from eroding. While it wasn't raining that night, these humps had been shaped by years of rain and 4x4 pickups.

We had successfully drove over numerous humps and were feeling pretty confident. Up ahead loomed yet another one, and from my view it didn't look menacing, we had drove over larger bumps already. But for whatever reason, this bump was out to screw us. Our car suddenly scraped bottom. Worse yet, at the same moment the car lost traction. Oh fuck! We threw the car in reverse and we couldn't get traction. At this point I immediately grabbed a flashlight and hopped out to see just what the fuck was going on.

I had assumed it was no big deal, but I could barely open my car door because it turned out we were high centered. High centered at 1:15am some 25 miles from the nearest paved road, and to make matters worse we didn't even know where the hell we were. Enter crisis mode...

The car weighed too much to lift by ourselves, there are times when good old American quality autos are a mixed blessing ... But we came up with a plan. We grabbed the car jack out of the trunk and began to lift up the front end of the car a few inches. With one person heaving all their body stregnth against the front bumper, the other person would try to back the car up. It would move maybe an inch and fall backwards off the jack to only be stuck again on the hump. But at least the car was moving backwards, and we had plently of time on our hands. The only problem was that there was no natural moonlight and we only had two flashlights. (Let's just say the Pelican M-10 paid for itself that night.) After an hour of being stuck in the woods the car broke free, but one even bigger problem still remained.

The road was too narrow to turn around. One side was a steep incline, and the other side was an embankment that went down to an abyss. That meant we would have to back out until we could find a wide spot, and that meant backing over all those humps we had already navigated.

I had to walk to car backwards with a flashlight down the road. Every 15 or so feet we would approach a hump, and would have to stop and discuss the angle at which to approach it. Then I would guide the car over the hump, careful to make sure the angles of approach lined up so we would not get stuck again. After backing up about 3/4 of a mile, we found a wide spot. I hopped back in the car, and we started the long drive out of the woods.

It took us at least another 45 minutes to drive back to civilization, where upon we decided that the mission was basically a failure. The car was trashed both inside and out, where it now has some battle scars from that night on Moscow Mountain. However, thanks to the quick thinking of operatives under pressure, we were able to free ourselves and not need the assistance of the Latah County Sheriff Search & Rescue Team...