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Ridge Runner Insights…

Wringing One Out In New Mexico’s Back Country

By David Gustafson

   Sometimes you get a feeling before you start on an adventure.  The anticipation builds, everything falls into place and you know you’re in for a day of intense fun.  So it was when we off-loaded the two Ridge Runners and set out to explore some of the wildest back country you could ever hope to lay eyes in the United States.  

  We strapped in, abandoned the truck and trailer and went through the second of four gates that would let us into the labyrinth of dirt roads occasionally strewn with rock or gouged with ruts from the rare cloudbursts that blow through.  There’s a lot here that seems to fit the descriptions and film clips I’ve seen of the Baja 1000.

   About four miles in, over roads that no one would want to venture over without a four-wheel drive…or a Ridge Runner, we came upon what I’ve dubbed “The Terraced Pools”.  There are hundreds of them, partitioned off by lime and sandstone ridges.  The only other place I’ve seen anything remotely resembling these hundreds of clear pools is Yellowstone National Park.  They’ve obviously taken centuries, if not millennia to form.  They’re placid and transparent as the sky…intriguing beyond words.

  Being December, we paid little heed to the cold or snow flurries that began swirling about us.  Further along the trail, we came upon a couple of cliff dwellings. They are complete, probably just as they were when they served the men who built them, undoubtedly Navajo or Apache Indian architecture…outposts for a pueblo we could never find.

   From there the road softened and while our truck would have been stuck in a heartbeat, the Ridge Runners rolled on unaffected.  Occasional stretches invited that “pedal to the metal” cliché and what a rush it brought on.  With a smooth road, the Ridge Runner will do about 60, but getting it up 40 in this environment, with ruts, rocks, loose sand and the occasional cow paddy, turned the focus to “intense”, with scan patterns out and back that bordered on blur.  I hit several deep cuts in the tracks that would have bent the axel on my Toyota Tundra at that speed, but the RR flew over them, barely registering the impact in the chassis. 

   We paused at a couple of foundations from some pioneer homes that had long since crumbled under the changing loads of time.  Past the “fixer-upper” stage, they aroused wonder about the kind of people who put those field stones together and what daily life would have been like.  The nearest general store might have been a two day’s ride.  Vestiges of a wild period long since tamed.

   More flurries and the ground was turning white, burying some of the rougher abuses in the roads.  We flew in the onslaught of snow, pushing the Ridge Runners to speeds no other vehicle I’ve ridden on could have kept pace with.  Approaching the road, we’ve dubbed as the back door entrance into the Jaws of Death, one that leads into to middle of the vast canyon, we passed a watering hole for cows and were stopped for several minutes by the unusual sight of wild mustangs.  There were eleven horses in the herd and there was no question about their freedom in that land: their manes and tails were much longer than you’d ever see on a domestic horse.  They were skitterish around us, but also very curious and ran, then stopped, circled, stopped, cross in front of us as though in defiance and ran into the vanishing countryside, dimmed by snow and fog.

   The road was quickly vanishing in the snow, but we pressed on to the high mesa that leads to the edge of The Jaws of Death.  It wasn’t to be.  The back door was buried and there’s too much erosion on the Cliffside to risk running it in a blizzard.  We headed for the mesa.

   Following a boulder covered road that rises about 500’ to the top of the mesa, the flurries turned into near white-out conditions.  “Is this what they mean by ‘winter storm warning’?” asked Dan Denney, who owns Ridge Runner.  He’d heard term on TV that morning..

   “Yeah, it can get pretty brutal at times.”

   There was no doubt in anyone’s mind now that we were treading on an edge.

   Snow was coming down at the rate of about 4 – 6 inches an hour.  Visibility was down to 50 feet, sometimes much less.  We followed the trail for another several miles, and then, with the absence of any kind of landmarks and with 9 inches of snow beneath us, we suddenly shifted into survival mode and turned back, seriously searching for our vanishing tracks.  We were navigating as much by instinct as visual cues.  Uncertainty was setting in, when we found, almost by accident the road down off the mesa. Descending to the desert we’d crossed below a half hour ago, we all let go a collective sigh of relief, knowing the snow was lighter and the way back was going to be a lot easier. 

   It was time to reflect on the performance of the Ridge Runner.  If one of them had died, we might all have frozen up there in the wilds.  What I found out later, after Dan Denney had a successful elk hunting trip with his Ridge Runner, was that the cargo deck would have made it possible for all four of us to escape those emergency conditions by hauling two people on the back cargo deck.  Dan trucked out a 400 pound elk in Idaho a month earlier.

   With two people in each vehicle, the Ridge Runners had plowed through 9 to 10 inches of snow like the ground was bare and dry.  We were relieved to get back to the truck and trailer, but determined to complete the loop.

   Two days later, in bright sunlight and New Mexico’s typical 150-miles of visibility, three of us went back in and rode like the wind until we got to the road leading through the back door of the canyon.  Enough snow had evaporated or settled to make the way clear and we followed the trail to the end, roughly near the very center of the inside of the canyon.  Wow!  What a view.  Sublime, colorful rock strata lined the walls of the canyon and smaller canyons followed the trails of occasional water to the deep V-cut on the east end of the canyon.

   We drove the Ridge Runners back up on the mesa and with all landmarks visible, left the road, easily traversing the snow and rocky, cactus-cluttered fields up to the edge of the enormous Jaws.  Along the way, we spooked a herd of perhaps 30 antelope.  Oh, what a temptation to give chase!  But it was getting late and we were not interested in getting stuck out there after dark.  Although the headlights on the Ridge Runners are very effective, navigation was too dependent on the hills and valleys that would disappear with the daylight.….

   As it was, we got back to the truck just as the sun went down, loaded up and drove the dusty road back to civilization.

    I’d driven that loop 9 or 10 times.  Done it in a Toyota Tundra, Ford Explorer, Jeep and 4WD Chevy truck.  None of them provided the sense of exhilaration, the thrill of discovery or the sense of achievement that came with negotiating that terrain at such high speeds.  On a trip that long and rough, an ATV would have beat the daylights out of us.  I simply cannot visualize or think of any other kind of vehicle as well designed for riding in the back country as the Ridge Runner.  It’s an awesome ticket to adventure and it really is a joy to be able to talk with a friend right beside you during such a kaleidoscope of visual thrills.

   Now, if I can just get one down to Baja.