March 18, 2000 - One Sunday after church, a group of us decided to go over to our place, have a barbecue, get stuffed on ribs, beans, potato salad and then do some local four-wheeling.  Since there was a good four-wheeling area less than two miles from our house, I readily agreed.

Our group consisted of four vehicles and everybody had their wives and children with them.  My beautiful wife, Sharlene, was riding as my co-pilot.  There was an area near the intersection of Baseline Road and Walerga Road in western Placer County (CA) that, at the time this artile was written, was very rural.  Basically it was an oak woodland consisting of creeks, rolling hills, steep trails and lots of MUD. Since I was the leader and, supposedly the most "experienced" in the group, I was elected as trail boss.

I decided that we should start from the west (Walerga Road) and head east, so we could play in the creeks and hills and exit out on Crowder Lane, to the east.  So we assembled at the trailhead off Walerga Road to start our journey.  The first obstacle was a gigantic mud hole, which didn't look very deep.  It was probably about 20 feet long, but there was no way around it.  Anyway, who wants to go around a mud hole?  I threw a rock into it, poked it with a branch, and pronounced it "doo-able."  So, I shifted into four-wheel drive and dove into the puddle head on.

Dove!  Yeah, that's exactly it; dove.  Or, more correctly sunk.  The front end of the truck sunk into the mud so the entire front bumper was under water and muddy water started to come into the cab.  Of course I tried the old back-up, go-forward routing, but it was a no-go.  To make matters worse, there were no oak trees close enough to winch to!  How embarrassing!

So, out comes the tow strap.  My buddy David was parked behind me on Walerga Road (paved) so I hitched to tow strap to one of the front tow hooks on his Toyota T-100 truck, and he was able to pull me out, albeit I was sideways and quite muddy.  We then took a different route and completed the rest of our excursion without further incident.  

Update:  September 11, 2004:  Sadly, this area is not four-wheeling friendly anymore, as there are houses being built in the area where I got stuck, and now the place featues many fine tract homes, complete with a golf course.  I guess my four wheeling adventures need to be taken further from my own back yard!