Day #6 - Friday June 7th, 2019:
My goal today was to make it out of Colorado, and in to Utah. I want to heath towards Silverton though to see what kind of photo opportunities I could get.
I headed towards Yankee Girl Mine. It's a great spot for photos, but the roads back to it were buried in feet of snow. I went a little further and stopped at the turn off for Black Bear Pass.
I love the sign sticking out of the snow recommending high clearance four wheel drive. LOL
Here I'm actually parked in front of the road to Black Bear Pass. Safe to say, it's going to be closed for a while.
If you've never seen US 550 south of Ouray Colorado, here's (2) videos:
I decided that I should just continue along the Trans America Trail (TAT), which would cross Ophir Pass from US 550 to SR 145 south of Telluride. I knew that it was closed due to snow as well, so I took the highway around the mountain and came south on SR 145 to intersect with the other end of Ophir Pass. I was dissapointed that I didn't get any photos of the truck in the snow.
After connecting with the TAT, I finally came to the the first off-pavement section for the day. The road goes up the side of the mountain without guardrails, but eventually trees become your guardrail.
The road started out dry, but then turned to mud, and then snow. The snow was wet and very heavy, and there was mud under it. As I was going up the hill, the truck started sliding to the left towards the trees and the drop off. I tried powering out of it, but stopped before I got in to bad of shape.
This my friends is why the FX4 should have a good front limited slip, or better yet, an electric locker. My FX4 Super Duty had a front limited slip, but the Ranger does not. The Chevy Colorado has a front locker option, and the Jeep Gladiator has a front locker. Their engineers understand the trend in adventure vehicles. They see the vehicle as the adventure, not just as a vehicle to haul things. I think Ford still sees the Ranger just as a truck that hauls things, and doesn't really understand it's potential.
But let me get off of that rant, and to the point...
A 2WD truck will fishtail and go up a muddy hill sideways because it's pushing against resistance.
A 4WD truck with only one wheel digging in the front can start doing the same thing if the wheel that's not digging is encountering a lot of resistance.
In this case, I got myself unstuck by digging some of the snow out from in front of the right front tire. You can see the snow building up in front of it because it's not digging. It's just hitting a wall, so the truck is starting to pivot around that point. Once I dug some snow out, I was able to get enough forward momentum to power through it.
This isn't an off-road park. This is a public road. their are roads like this all over the country that people have to drive on. And I can't tell you how many signs I've seen out west that indicate that there's no winter maintenance, or no plowing after certain hours and on the weekends. If you're going to call it off-road, make it off-road capable.
If I would have had the factory all terrains, I would have been in trouble, and stuck for a while. Their tread would have been packed full of mud and snow and offered no traction whatsoever.
Damn I'm bitchy today. What the hell, I might as well get it all out of my system. If manufactures didn't install traction control, then we we wouldn't need terrain management to override it!
In all fairness to the Ranger, I actually blasted through this snow (below) with the Terrain Management in the snow setting, and the rear axle locked. The
Cooper Discover STT PRO's helped a whole lot as well. The Terrain Management wasn't a factor in me getting stuck sideways.
I got a little further down the road and ran in to a whole lot of snow, so I decided it was time to turn around.
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