Your Most Harrowing Drive
 

I've been reading a few of these posts and noticed where people have mentioned driving on roads or bridges that unnerved them and I got to thinking about what were my most harrowing drives. Several come to mind, but the scariest to me was the drive up Pikes Peak. The road to the top of Pikes Peak is (or was) dirt with hairpin curves and a drop-off on one side of hundreds of feet with no railings. Plus you're meeting traffic and if you're on the side of the road nearest the drop-off, your heart ends up in your throat.

The Beartooth Highway has several "OMG" areas, as does US550 between Durango and Ouray and the road between Yellowstone NP and Cody. But these roads are paved, which reduces (a little) the "heart in throat" factor.

Honorable mention for the "OMG" feeling goes to walking across the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado. The fact that you can see through the bridge to the river 1000 feet below AND that the bridge moves is very unnerving.

So, what is your most harrowing drive?

Keith

We drove around the west side of Maui. I white knuckled it the whole way. Driving around the edge of 1500' cliffs with no guardrails and in the rain was not my idea of fun. My husband was having a great time for himself though. One lane hairpins and driving rains on a dirt road. Let me tell you I was bargaining with God that day. I bet I set the guiness record for holding my breath the longest. This was not the Hana drive, which, is a piece of cake compared to this drive. This was up through the mountains of west Maui. When I dared take looksee, from what I remember it was stuningly beautiful.

Oh Thanks Keith! We're doing the Beartooth Highway and taking the road out of Yellowstone into Cody in two weeks! Yikes!
My OMG was route 120 into Yosemite. It also was around a mountain with drop offs a thousand feet and no guard rails. Another OMG was Up Taylor Ave heading toward the Wharf in SF! Before you know it you're over the hill, in the middle of an intersection that was not visible and heading downnnnnnn!

I vote for Pikes Peak as the most harrowing drive I've been on. It was ok until we got above the timber line - after that, there was nothing to keep the car from rolling down the mountain if we should happen to fall off the road.

The most harrowing drive I've ever been on is anywhere on I-95 between Boston and Miami.

A close second is Atlanta. Yes, the entire city.

The freeways between Los Angeles Airport and Pasadena unnerve me. I live on a small island where even crazy drivers never go faster than 35 or 40 where the road is flat. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a woman reading a magazine while driving about 50 mph on the freeway. Give me back roads any day.

cd, don't sweat the Beartooth. Just take your time going around the curves and if traffic backs up behind you, pull over when you can so they can pass. Enjoy it, it's spectacular.

The day after Thanksgiving 1992 on PCH1 from Stinson Beach to Mill Valley in the thickest fog I have ever been in.
Steep cliffs and stormy ocean on the right and steep cliffs and ??? on the left. I think my top speed was 3 miles an hour!! I also recall that, after we got home, this might have been the evening my b.f. introduced me to Bushmills ! LOL
R5

driving from Boston to Rochester NY, many years ago. As we went thru the Berkshires we drove thru an electric storm I will never forget. To pull over seemed more dangerous than going on. Lightning hitting so close the car felt the strikes. It was so bad, I could not look in my rearview mirror as my eyes dialated with each strike. Had I been alone, I don't know how I would have drove on.It was the scariest most inspiring drive of my life....literally seeing lightning strike all around you and no where to go but forward....amazing.

ok, so I missed the original post's idea,.......driving the million dollar highway from Silverton to Ouray....coming up to a bend in the road and I said, "Honey; I think I just saw a landslide up ahead....just around the bend, sure enough, huge landslide, from the cliff, 3 ft deep to the edge about a foot. There was a van infront of us and a guy washing off at the falloff from the other way. Timing is everything, and if we waited, well we took the moment, and in our little Mustang convertable with no clearance whatsoever, siked the van in front of us to move on. We swwerved our way out of there, knowing how to drive in snow, believing life in a mudslide can't much differ. Well in our rearview mirror we saw a Ford 350 run into trouble....we kept driving and never looked back until we reached Ouray and let them know the highway was closed and tourist would soon be turning back. A true life time moment, when timing is everything!

The Amalfi Coast by far! There's only a 2 foot rail to keep you from plunging 300 feet into the ocean!
In the US the drive on Molokai to the waterfalls & the east side of the island, again no guard rails and one lane around very sharp turns from the shore line and up into the mountains.

My most harrowing drive-- a few days ago when my daughter got her learner's permit and I began sitting in the right passenger seat! My foot kept pressing down on the floor, as if there was a brake there!

I've got two: Just last week we accidently got on the "Oh my God Road" (it's actually named that) from Central City to Idaho Springs, Colorado at 10 p.m. in the pitch dark. Up a mountain, down again, on dirt roads, with just over a single lane, no railings, and no lights. I thought I was going to die, especially when we got to the official sign warning to travel at your own risk! I am so glad we did it in the dark so I couldn't see how far I was going to fall to my death. The second was the road from San Jose to Carmel, California, just after the major floods about five years ago. My husband thought nothing of driving the downslope lane despite the fact that the upslope lane had been washed away down the cliff.
When we got to the bottom, it was totally blocked by a landslide, and we had to turn around and come back up.
The road to Hana was nothing after that.

Any road is a scary road with my 17 year old daughter behind the wheel!

Agree with the above and 3 others come to mind--

the Kipur pass between Pakistan and Afghanistan (this was awhile back--it's probably even more scary now)

the road to Nerja from Marbella (though I'm going back in Nov., but taking anti-virtigo pills first--my husband's driving)

and the highway between Montana and Idaho where a deer ran into our car while we were going around 70mph

Some of the above postings just raised my blood pressure while I was reading them. Yikes! doesn't begin to cover it for some of you guys. Anyway, here are mine:

Blue Ridge Parkway in dense fog. It was my first time EVER to drive on a mountain (I'm from good old FLAT Florida). I was all alone and white knuckled it around every bend, not knowing which way it would turn next. I'd been a passenger many times before, but this was a first for me! I had this plan to go from motel to motel comparing prices to get the best rate, but when I saw the first sign for lodging, I took it, no questions asked. Had a drink with dinner to calm my nerves!

The other nerve-biting drive I had the pleasure to take was driving down a slick, rock and dirt one-lane mountain road with my girlfriend telling me how good a job I was doing! Never again do I want to do that drive!

White Water rafting on the Ocoee River was a piece of cake compared to these drives!

oops! I meant nail-biting or nerve-wracking (not nerve-biting...LOL)

Great topic...

I love driving through winding mountain roads. The wifes complexion turns a chalky white..I love it (she doesn't)lol.

On the other hand the Borman Expressway between Chicago thru Northern Indiana..reportedly the most trucks on any stretch of road in the US (trafic flows above 70mph when it isn't stopped). Honestly my kids counted trucks for only one mile of travel and there were something like 160 that went by us on the other side of the highway. That is my white knuckle area.

Driving over the mountains of Crete is a harrowing experience. The roads are narrow and winding with a cliff going up on one side and down on the other. No shoulders, no railings. There are little memorials (that look like church-shaped mainboxes) erected every few hundred feet where people have lost their lives going over the cliff.

When I took a 2.5-hour bus ride across Crete a couple years ago, I was amazed at how fast the driver went. These roads were CURVY, and my busmates and I were green with nausea. There were a ton of blind corners that he whizzed right around, taking the chance that no one would be coming in the other direction. Well guess what - someone DID come around the corner - another bus - and we happened to be on the outside of the turn - the cliffside. Our driver made the turn at the last possible second to avoid hitting the other bus - and he turned so sharply that we did a 180, then stopped short. By some pure stroke of luck we didn't go over the cliff. Then the driver just turned the bus around and kept going as if nothing had happened.

I'm not sure which was the worse, so it's a tossup:

Speeding downhill from Jerome AZ, in the Mingus Mts on a bicycle, rounding a curve & finding cattle-grates in the highway. No time to slow down to a "safe" speed to cross them and somehow crossing them without a crash.

Driving my bicycle up the canyon between Sedona & Flaggstaff --- all the switchbacks, rather narrow roads, and all kinds of motorcoach buses, RVs and camper trailers to share the road with.

or

a week later, and bicycling downhill from Las Vegas NM to Tucumcari (Rt 104?) -- I think the town was Trujillo, but on a white-knuckle downhill I found later on my speedometer/computer that I had a max speed of 56 mph. At the time I was too busy watching the road to be looking at the speedometer, so I'm glad it had a max function.

Traveling by bicycle is *so* much more exciting!