On Friday, I was riding alone on my side-by-side UTV (Polaris RZR) in the mountains east of my hometown. It was a wet winter and wet spring. Snow is still melting higher up from this spot and creating lots of streams and puddles of mud I needed to drive through.
There were no problems until I hit this puddle, which was about four feet deep.
Covered head-toe-in mud, I needed to hike about five miles to the nearest road and another three or four miles before a nice Tongan guy picked me up (no cell phone service in those mountains).
When I got back into town, I called my nephew, who has a side-by-side with a winch. We drove back up there. I needed to dive down into the mud to locate a place to hook the cable. After he winched out the RZR, it was full of water and mud.
Even worse, one of the rear tires had a two-inch gash in its sidewall, so we needed to drive back into town to get a new tire. When we returned to the RZR, the jack wasn’t working, so we winched the RZR up into a tree to get it off the ground enough to change the tire. The tire didn’t fit, so we left it suspended from the tree overnight and headed back up the next morning.
I wish I had gotten a photo of it mostly submerged in that muddy hole, but my mind wasn’t thinking of taking pictures until we got it out. Luckily it started up Saturday morning after a few tries. It took me all yesterday afternoon and most of today to get most of the mud out of every nook and cranny in that thing.
Mrs. Just-B stayed in the city while I was in my hometown having, um, fun. During the night, a bobcat clawed its way through the bedroom screen door and scared the bejeebers out of her and our dog. Mrs. Just-B managed to get the door fully open while our dog was chasing the bobcat around the bedroom. It finally ran out the door with our dog right behind it. Luckily, our dog didn’t catch it.
We see bobcats around the neighborhood every now and then, but this was the first one to get in the house.
Holy Moly!!! I don’t think you need a “relaxing weekend” very often. Wow! You’ve brought new meaning to the sport of ''Mudding"
Very glad the Mrs and the little princess are ok too. As much as I love the kitties … I’m not sure I would want to cosy up to a Bobcat any time soon That’s pretty scary!
And people wonder why the general rule is “don’t drive into water even if you think it can’t possibly be that deep”
I once rode my father’s ATV across a small “dried up” pond in a pasture, at pretty high speed. I say “dried up” because that’s what it looked like, full of cattle tracks and everything. Pretty common sight in a western ks pasture, close to a river in mid-summer.
It was only “dry” on the surface, maybe the first inch. The rest of it was sticky clay river mud about 1.5ft deep. I had his brand new ATV completely covered in muck, mud and manure trying to back it out after having made it half way across.
When I got back, my father admonished me for the risk. Apparently there are spots like that one close by that river that completely swallowed wagons back in the old west / settler days, and farm equipment more recently than that. If it’d been the wrong “dried up” pond, I might not have come back from that excursion.
Agreed. I won’t be driving through what I assume to be a shallow pool of water again. There’s no more effective way to learn a lesson than learning it the hard way.
There was a woman out this way that got stuck in the mud in a swamp just this past week. Not a lot of details, but she was stuck out there for at least 3 days and had been reported missing. Some hikers heard her screaming and reported it. She was not on an ATV…
Can only think she was hummock jumping alone and missed. Wouldn’t know anything about that. Nope. (I wasn’t alone. And it was only a little over knee deep. Took some doing to get out though, my buddy laughing his ass off the whole time. Coulda been worse. Coulda been deeper.)
The grassy knobs are hummocks. The water in between them is usually shallow over a thick layer of mud. Sometimes if you want to get to where the fish are jumping, you look to see if you think you can jump your way out there. Dumb. And never alone.
Conflicting reports say the woman was in the mud or in a car in the mud. They aren’t saying much else because the woman “has a history of mental illness.” And they shouldn’t have said that much. Kudos to the firemen who jumped in the water to get her.
That’s pretty scary!