Subaru Offroad!

(If you want to jump right to the pictures – click here: http://www.lyser.net/pix/claim6101/index1.html). Note you can click each tiny picture to see a larger version.

I posted the following true adventure on 6/5/01 to the Subaru Outback Mailing-List (hosted at yahoo.com). This List amounts to a virtual car club where advice and tales are posted daily to be shared by a few hundred Subaru enthusiasts. I had found the Outback List in 1999 when I was trying to decide if a Subaru would be sufficient to use offroad to replace my elderly Isuzu Trooper. Reading others’ experiences convinced me that this would work, so I bought one.

Chris

I thought some of you might like to see photos of an Outback used offroad.

My daughter is home from college, so we made a visit to our gold mining claim in the Sierras. This is in a remote part of northeastern California 20 miles beyond the end of the pavement and 40 miles beyond the last country-store gas pump. The road into our area has been abandoned since the last logging contract, several years now. We went alone and saw only one other vehicle - fortunately another miner with a chainsaw who helped us open our driveway.

The pictures show the primary road, the driveway down to our streamside campsite, and our trip the next day to another claim a mile up the canyon where I renewed my annual on-site posting of the Mining Claim papers at the trailhead. I drove down as far as a logger's clearing at the end of a quarter mile skid trail. That skid trail was put in to haul out a giant tree - look at the size of the stump! I have named the skid trail 'Sal-Si-Puede' ('get out if you can'.) The pictures show why!

In the first set of pictures, in our driveway, is an illustration showing how the Primitive engine guard I installed last year prevented underside damage. I used the Outback to slowly pack down rocks and soil that I dumped in a hole where the side of the driveway had washed away last winter. Suddenly my fill gave way, and the car flopped on its belly with a wheel dangling over the washout - and the creek 50 ft below. I discovered that shifting my luggage to the opposite corner lifted the wheel and created some ground clearance at that corner, so I drove right out after 5 minutes of wedging rocks under the dangling tire.

The part I had expected to be difficult, the second day trip to the upper claim, went perfectly. I never heard a tire slip and the only scraping I heard underneath was the little pine trees growing up in the middle of the abandoned skid trail. I think I could easily tow my little utility trailer down there next time.

The automatic transmission provided plenty of torque to get started from a standstill up the steepest upgrades. With a quarter throttle the car gently started to climb with no wheelspin or drama, in contrast to a manual transmission that would have to to slip something to start up a steep slope from a standstill. I had bought my first A/T in many years specifically for this ability, and it worked very well.

I think this Outback is a keeper! Home with the dust washed off, there is not a scratch to reveal where it had been.

The pictures are on two pages starting at http://www.lyser.net/pix/claim6101/index1.html

Enjoy!