RV Adventures

Dirt.  Mud.  Red River Valley soil.  Nutrient filled. Slippery when wet.

Jim and I had an unexpected adventure yesterday morning.  The harvest is shut down due to rain.  So I said “Let’s drive down to the Ohio Field where you were working and see what is what.”  He agreed and off we went in our nice clean Jeep (I finally got around to cleaning it inside and out three days ago).

It was cold, but clear morning.

We came upon the Ohio Field where Sproule Farms had been working. The tractors were still there, but the trucks that haul the beets off the field are not.

Jim turned down the lane they used to get on and off the field. I was busy snapping pictures of the equipment on the field.  Beet lifter in foreground, scraper tractor behind that, you can just see the “business” end of the pull tractor.  The device sticking out is what they use to latch onto and pull trucks when they loose traction.

The Jeep started to slide a little and I remarked “Does the Jeep have a mud mode on the 4 wheel drive settings?”  Jim looked down at the Jeep settings and we promptly started sliding towards the field.  What!?!  Jim was astonished, this wasn’t like driving on mud, it was like driving on a sheet of ice.  Totally unexpected, he’d never experienced mud like this.

Jim somehow got us back onto the lane with a lot of mud flying off the wheels.  And there we were, on a muddy country lane with a ditch on the left and a muddy field on the right and ZERO traction!  What to do?

Thus began a harrowing drive.  We didn’t want to stop for fear of not being able to get going again.  There was no way to turn around, you would slide into either the field (which we came close to a number of times) or the ditch (which at least had grass in it).  And who would tow us out of a ditch if you can’t easily drive down the lane to get to us?

Jim knew that the lane came out on a hard road surface at the other end…he had driven it with the farmer on Saturday morning.  So we drove on.  For 2 miles.  Slipping and sliding left and right.  The lane was crowned, so either the Jeep was sliding off to the left or the right, or the back end was at a 45 degree angle to the front and we were driving sideways.  There is no way a person could drive down this lane if they didn’t have experience drive in the winter.  It was like driving on a sheet of ice.

At one point Jim said “Look behind us.”  You could see our trail in the mud. I took this picture in the passenger side mirror.  And remember how I said I had just cleaned the Jeep?  Well, it wasn’t clean any more.  Clumps of dirt were flying up all over the Jeep.

After 20 minutes of terror (for me) and amusement (for Jim), we finally hit hard pavement. And even then, we slid the first couple of feet due to mud on the tire treads. “Stop the car.  I need to take a couple of pictures!”

The passenger side definitely got the most mud. The wheel wells were packed with mud. The car shimmied and shook all the way back to Grand Forks with mud packed the tires.

These are our tracks where we exited the lane. We weren’t sinking into the mud, we were sliding on the mud!  We left behind 2 miles of tracks like this.  Don’t be fooled by the straight tracks, this was the only portion of the lane where Jim could keep it straight.

This was my view driving back to Grand Forks. Mud on the windshield. All while I’m googling “car wash” on my phone.

And here we are, back at the same car wash where I lovingly cleaned the Jeep just three days ago. It took $10.50 of quarters to get all the extremely sticky mud out of the wheel wells, the tires, and off the car itself.

This sign is fairly common along the roads during sugar beet harvest season.  Now we know why.  They aren’t kidding.

Jim says he would not have believed dirt could be so slick if he hadn’t experienced it himself.  Never in all his years of hanging around farms had he ever experienced slick soil like this.  I did some research and found that the soil is a clay soil.  It is composed of 40% clay.  Well, that explains it.  Clay is slippery as I know from my pottery wheel throwing days.

Some day we will laugh about this.  Some day.  It’s still a little too soon for me. For some reason, “Curiosity killed the cat” keeps popping into my mind. This adventure ranks up there with the time we almost took the top off the RV re-entering the USA from Canada in September of 2014. 

Jim wants to chime in with a few comments now…..

This was a totally unbelievable experience.  I would not have believed anyone who tried to explain how slippery the dirt here is.  Words can’t match the experience.  I’d seen the slippery mud signs and thought it was the typical “there is dirt on the road” warning.  Now I know it is much more dangerous.  Seeing them in the past there was only a few small spots of mud on the road, not enough to make a driver lose control.  But the day before it rained I had been driving over a long section of the road that was completely covered with mud.  Luckily it had not been raining so the mud was just hard packed onto the road and you still had traction.  If it had rained and I had hit that at 55 mph with a 90 thousand pound beet truck, I don’t think the results would have been good.  Imagine hitting black ice in that situation, too scary to think about.

If you think I’m exaggerating how bad the road was, I’m not.  There were two beet fields on opposite sides of the road with driveways directly across from each other.  Hundreds of truck loads of beets from each field had pulled onto the road and deposited layer after layer of mud completely covering the entire road.  When the fields were finished, the county showed up with a road grader to scrape all the dirt off the road.  It took the grader almost a hour to clean about a 1/3 mile section back down to the pavement.  Picture what the side of the road would look like if the snow plow had to clean 4″ to 6″ of snow off the road.  Picture the pile at  the edge of the road, now change the picture from snow to dirt and you have the image of what it looked like when the grader was done.

As they say, “experience is the best teacher”, or “live and learn”.  We did.