Canyonlands National Park (an addendum)
My escape route
We decided to, as usual, take some dirt/rock roads to view the area from a different perspective. We had been on the road for about 3 ½ hours without seeing another vehicle when suddenly the road collapsed under our left front tire. The gulley to the left of the truck had undermined over time and our heavy diesel was simply too much for the road to hold us up. As you can see from the second picture, we were at quite an angle. When I opened the door on my side I was looking directly into the gulley. The bottom was about 15 feet down so I stepped onto the armrest to get over the top of the door.
The only shade
Kathy couldn't get her door opened because of the angle so I pulled while she pushed and we gave her an escape route. It was afternoon and so, since we had not seen another vehicle, we tried our cell phones. No bars! We carry small, hand held short wave radios with nine channels, 7 of which are walky-talky and two of which are short wave. We sent out requests for help but received no answers. We had a bag of trail mix and a gallon of water in addition to our bottles. The temperature was in the 80s but nighttime temperatures were in the 40s. The only shade was under our truck. We were about 50 miles from the nearest humans as far as we could tell so Kathy was certain that we were going to die in the desert. My optimism, though, had someone coming along in spite of the fact that we had seen no traffic all day.
Not 20 minutes after the wreck I spotted three 4-wheel drive vehicles approaching us from the direction we were heading. They turned out to be 3 young men from Colorado Springs who were driving the road for adventure. They had been driving for a couple of days from Moab, UT and said they had only seen one other person during that time. He was on a 7 day hike--no vehicle.
Because they are accustomed to getting stuck they had a winch on one of the vehicles. In fact they had already had to use it once to free one of their car the previous day. It also was serendipitous that the driver of that vehicle had spent a couple of years as a tow truck driver. They attached the winch to the passenger rear frame and a second vehicle attached a tow rope to the hitch on our truck. The winch pulled down the right rear of the truck while the other vehicle pulled us backward while I had the truck in reverse/4-wheel drive. It came out smoothly with no structural damage, as attested to by a Ford dealership when I had the oil changed a few days later. Only some dents and scratches to the left front quarter panel. We turned around and headed back, following them to civilization.
We dodged another one.