It might be useful to give some warnings to people who pull trailers on forest roads. I used to think that all that was necessary was to look at Benchmark Atlas, and find roads marked by heavy dashed red lines. This worked well on the Colorado Plateau or on BLM land in the desert Southwest.
But in the inland Northwest, this method isn't working so well. I don't know whether it is because Benchmark's state atlases are inferior in this part of the country, or that the landscapes (non-mesa and thickly forested) are to blame.
Whatever the explanation, I had to back my trailer down a road for 0.6 miles the other day. I have never done more than a hundred yards in the past.
The trick was to move at 1-2 miles per hour, get out of the driver's seat frequently, and pull forward occasionally to straighten things out.
Even more important was learning how to anticipate corrections at the steering wheel. Looking in the mirrors of the van I made small corrections to the tiniest bit of crookedness in the direction of the trailer. If the crookedness was obvious, it was already too late.
I thought about how incompetent the Federal Reserve has been over the years. Based on my experience on these mountain roads, I humbly suggest that academic and mathematical training for Federal Reserve members is over-rated. Instead, have them freak out backing a trailer down a mountain road, with steep fall-offs on the outside curves. It is a lesson they will never forget.
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| from cliffkule.com |
Other suggestions for the problem of doing mountain roads with a trailer:
1. Get a trailer with inboard wheel-wells. Most factory-ready travel trailers have inboard wheel-wells. But the industry standard with cargo trailers is exterior wheel-wells, so it will be be a custom order to get interior wheel-wells.
2. Drop the trailer soon when going into the forest, and explore the road just with your tow vehicle. The inconvenience is not so bad! Record the locations of three-point turnaround points. Play "leap frog" with these points if necessary. Be careful of doing a three-point turn with an acute angle or on a hill.
3. Surrender gracefully if the roads are narrow and you see signs about logging operations on the roads.
4. Don't laugh off loose dust on hills. You can loose traction!
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