Day 1 of a Long Weekend

My cousin is a Material Sciences graduate student. Usually, he's hard at work (or research) in one of the basement labs (seriously) at the University of Michigan. But every once in a while, they let him out to go to a conference. It is for this reason that he and I spent four days last week in New Mexico and Colorado.

Norman's five day conference is this week in Santa Fe, NM. Because he's smart, he got the great idea of extending his time in the Southwest a few days, and invited me to come along for a long photography weekend . Since I've had the travel itch for the past few months, I gave him the thumbs up and we quickly planned out our short and busy itinerary. Little did we know what was in store for us.

DAY ONE

The Plan:

1. Fly into Albuquerque (which I still have problems spelling) on Thursday, early afternoon.

2. Drive up to Chaco Canyon, NM in time for the golden hour before the sunset.

3. Camp and try out some night shoot (star trails, light painting, etc).

What actually happened:

Due to a delay in my flight and at the car rental place, plus a quick (and delicious) early dinner at a New Mexican restaurant, we didn't get on the road until 4pm or so. By then the storm clouds has darkened, and the rains came. By the time we turned off the highway onto the 16 miles of unpaved Country Road 7900, it was dark. And muddy. We actually had planned for this, and rented a SUV thinking it would help with the terrain. Yeah, not so much.

After driving 13 miles of our 16 mile road, we came across was the gushing flow of flood water over the road.... Preceding the torrent was not one, but two signs stating "Do Not Cross Road When Any Water Is Present". As you can probably guess, we weren't exactly prepared to ford a river in a rental Chevy. (Get it? Ford, Chevy... Sorry bad joke.) So there we are, stopped in the dark, blocked by a river of flood water. Since both of us are city slickers, we decided to wait for the water to recede a bit (it had stopped raining for some time by then). To pass the time, out came the cameras.

We messed around for a while, most of which was spent experimenting with nightime photography and throwing rocks into the middle of the overflow, trying to guage the water's depth. After multiple bad exposures, a few kerplunks!, and an hour going by, I decided it was time to brave the obstacle since the water looked to have receded quite bit. And what an anti-climatic crossing it was. We drove straight through, with no problems whatsoever.  (Now that I think of it, the SUV was a Chevy Traverse. Fitting.) Although that was the ideal outcome, I've experienced more drama from driving over SR520 in sunshine.

That wasn't it though. The peak of adventure came shortly thereafter. As I mentioned earlier, the road was muddy. Muddy and rutted in many places, and MUD-DEE in others. It is the latter where we began to experience the "SUV slip and slide". At this point, I'm driving about 5 miles an hour, sliding every direction. The car's tires had caked on 3 inches of mud, negating any tread that was on the tire. So here we are, controlled sliding down the road. It was progress though, until the fateful moment when the Chevy's backend slid a bit too close to the ditch... the next thing we knew was the car was resting at a 45 degree angle in the ditch. The right tires in the bottom, the left tires on the trough wall. At this point, I'm thanking God that there's no damage to the car and also wondering why we didn't get the optional insurance at the rental counter in case things got worse.

Since we weren't planning on staying in that position all night,  I decide to try to drive out. No good. Every time the front tires moved up the ditch wall, they'd come sliding back down. The only option that remained for us was to drive down the channel like the Duke boys of Hazzard county and hope we'd be able to get out. (I really wish we had gotten a few pictures of this, but at the time we both were preoccupied.) Finally, after what seemed like a mile, but was probably a couple hundred feet, I was able to gun the car enough to squirt out of the situation.

The rest of the evening was uneventful. As you can tell, nothing really went according to plan that day... we arrived at the campsite too late to capture sunset, which wouldn't have mattered since the storm clouds were out anyway. We weren't able to shoot star trails (once again due to the clouds), and the weather was fickle enough for us to decide to lay down the seats in the SUV, and forgo the tent. All in all, long and exciting first day to our long weekend.