Got lost on a mountain road with my partner in scorching heat in Apple Valley, CA with no cell phone reception. Picture a one lane road not much wider than our car with an almost sheer cliff on one side. It lead to a point with a super steep rocky climb that my little coupe would have no chance of getting over. The only option was to backtrack. There was no way I was going to drive in reverse the whole way down, so I got out and tried to gauge how much room there was to turn around. I look over the edge and see an old rusted pickup truck belly up at the bottom of the gorge. I calmly get back in the car and ask my partner to make hand signals when I get close to the edge and started doing a 137+point turn inch by inch to get the car turned around. Eventually we got out of there and had a fun rest of our trip, but feel like we could easily have met the same fate as that upended truck. I later told my partner about that truck, and they said they saw it but kept calm and didn't tell me so I wouldn't freak out either.
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Corsica. The Calanques de Piana. The road is barely one coach wide, and it's got a sheer drop on one side and goes straight up on the other. Everybody parks on the passing places so if you meet someone you're screwed. I met a coach. Luckily I was driving a Twingo. I managed to get past it with one side of the car about 5 cm from the drop, with the coach driver helping me out. The coach badly scratched one of the cars parked on the passing place. Karma for the dumb tourist.
Devils backbone by Loveland, CO. Such a steep and curvy road. Road was made up of mostly really large rocks, so didn't feel much like a road. Was definitely scared my truck would slip off at any wrong move, never went there again lol
Also in Colorado: on the way to Handies Peak, there’s a one lane road with a steep drop off on one side and a mountain incline on the other. No guardrail. We made the mistake of going on a holiday weekend, so we were scraping past one Jeep after another, with the plummeting depths inches from our tires. Never again.
Devils backbone by Loveland, CO
Is that the actual name of the road? Can't seem to find it anywhere.
I actually am not sure I can try to find it on maps
The road to Hana on Maui, in the dark, in the rain, with the wipers not working that great. Every hundred feet is a hairpin turn or a one-way bridge. The locals drive it at like 80 mph. Definitely an adventure.
Definitely road to Hana. Especially doing the complete loop that has you end upcountry. Those cliff-side sections where the guardrails are rusted and busted are intense in the best conditions.
Highway 63, before it was twinned as much as it is. During the oil boom fucking sports cars would appear out of nowhere and try a suicide pass of 8 vehicles coming right at you going the opposite way. Terrifying. A truck tried to pass another way back in 2012 and ended up killing 7 people including an 11 year old girl which sparked the need to twin the highway.
I just drove to Alaska and back by way of the Alaska highway through Canada in a Ford van. The road is pretty destroyed for about 300 miles around the border of Alaska and Canada. Huge potholes, massive hills, sections of road that have collapsed, wildlife, dirt and gravel sections, massive cliffs, and twisty roads all while traffic is moving at 55-70ish mph.
In iraq, the insurgets blew up the left abd right sides of the road. you litterally can only drive in the middle of the road, some roads where blown up all together so we just had to follow the guy in front of us and hope to not get blown up :P
Most of the roads in Ireland, at least for my 'Murrican sensibilities. My wife and I took our honeymoon in Ireland and rented a car to get around. Aside from driving on the opposite side of the road, we were unprepared for how narrow all but the main highways were. The typical road there is comparable to a small country road here, is often lined with hedges right up to the edges, and often lacks a center line. The sheer terror of going past a large truck going the opposite way on one of those for the first time was very, very memorable. We eventually got used to it, but that first day or two of driving was definitely white-knuckled.
It's the same in the UK and I'd expect most of Europe too.
Cornwall though is in a whole different category of narrow roads - https://youtu.be/T5dBPhZivto from ~4 min 30
well.... it made the news: https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/is-this-britains-worst-road-kettering-parents-furious-at-school-access-1327488
Quite tame for most other places, but unusually standard for the UK.
Road I live on a manhole cover is literally half exposed out the road. not the rover to it, the actual frame the cover goes into. council doesn't care. But they just repaved a road which had only been done 5 years before, and definitely didn't need re-doing.
Some background: I have a horrendous fear of heights.
To start, I remember going down to South Carolina when I was 18 to visit my friend. Her friend drove us through an Appalachian mountain road at blood-curdling speeds and I was kind of drafting out my will in my head.
Similar story to when I went to California for my cousin's wedding more recently. I find something about those mountain roads around Hollywood to be absolutely nauseating. Serpentine, narrow, had me holding on to the Oh Shit handles of the rental car.
I forget the name of the road but it was a class 4 dirt road in New England near my Dad's place that looked like a stream bed and had actual boulders sticking out a few inches in places.
Hate that. Took my car down a trailhead to unload my kayak and felt like I was gonna pop my oil pan
I was taking my son to a Bar Mitzvah party and it was starting to get dark. Google said I needed to turn left. The road looked a bit "rural," but who am I to argue with Google?
I immediately realized that I should have argued. The road was a dirt road with ditches on either side and bare trees overhanging. It looked like a scene from a horror movie right before the psycho clown attacks with a chain saw. I kept this thought to myself, though, to prevent my son from freaking out. Instead, I just freaked out internally while calmly expressing confidence that we'd arrive soon.
The road was barely one car width so turning around was impossible. Backing up would have been difficult as well. So on we went. The road twisted and turned and at one point I swear we drove through someone's back yard.
Finally, we got back on a normal road, but Google was being even more useless. I found someone and asked them where we were and how we should get back to where we were supposed to be. The person said that we shouldn't be on this road at all as it was a private road. They weren't upset, though. Apparently, this happened frequently with Google's directions. The person gave me directions and we soon made it to the Bar Mitzvah party without being too late.
I-95 between NJ-440 and Stamford, CT
I'll give two but both of them are more situational than they are explicit design flaws.
The more recent one: I was driving with my current girlfriend to Tennessee from Georgia on an incredibly twisty, narrow mountain road that was simultaneously undergoing construction. Not too bad right?
Well this construction meant big ass barriers blocking the shoulders entirely. That + it being 2-3 AM, pitch black, and raining it's needless to say my steering wheel still has the imprints from my terrified grip that day. I wish I could've stuck my head out and asked the other drivers if they were as stressed out about that road as I was.
Second one: first ever driving in snow back in December of 2019 I wanna say. I was I dunno 21?
My now ex-girlfriend and I decided to take my car on our road trip from Georgia to Colorado because I had just gotten new tires. Sounds like a good idea, right? Little did we know my fuckin heater would give out maybe two hours into the trip. Cut forward a few hours we're in the flat hell that is Kansas and there's a whole ass blizzard happening.
Driving through heavy snow for the first time in my life was daunting enough but add on the fact that my windshield would not stop freezing over/fogging up, my now ex-girlfriend yelling at me about how cold it was, and my extremities losing feeling as my ex hogged the space heater I wired to my car battery and you have a pretty miserable ass trip.
I drove the whole way through. I drove all 24 hours without switching off to let her drive because she was too scared to drive in those conditions. I mean I can't really blame her for that but I can blame her for being really mean to me the whole time and I can blame her for how she acted when we broke up the next month.
We were driving from Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on the east coast of Costa Rica to San Jose to catch our late flight home. We had decided to go to the Jaguar Rescue Center in the morning, thinking we had lots of time for the drive. That turned out to be a bad call because there had been torrential rain in Braulio Carrillo National Park, our planned route on highway 32 was closed due to landslides, and alternate routes doubled our trip time. We'd budgeted lots of time to get to San Jose before our flight so that part wasn't a problem, but it meant we'd be driving through the mountains after dark.
Holy shit let me tell you, when tourist guides to Costa Rica tell you not to drive in the mountains after dark, it is for a good fucking reason. Picture a steep, winding mountain road. Now imagine gutters on either side of the road that are V-shaped, four feet deep with 45 degree sloping sides. Now blanket the whole scene in the thickest pea soup fog you can imagine. That's mountain driving after dark in Costa Rica.
This was done in a shitty little rental hatchback with no fog lights, because of course we weren't planning to do any mountain driving after dark but fuck if it didn't happen anyway! It was a solid hour of the most intense pucker-factor driving I've ever had to do. The only reason I'm not a corpse on the side of a Costa Rican mountain is because some local with fog lights passed me on one of those roads, and by god I got onto that guys tail lights like fucking tick and drafted him all the way down the mountain. Shout out to the Costa Rican in that beat-up red pickup, I'm only alive today because of him.
Haha. I knew I was gonna find our roads here.
And yeah you drove by the Cerro de la Muerte (Death Mountain) at night. That's a big no-no!
That road is always almost coveted with fog (even during the day).
I would say this road is second most dangerous after Route 32. And yeah, Route 32 is the worst offender here. It cuts through one of our biggest national parks. It has no business there, and mother nature is always trying to reclaim that lost strip.
Always avoid doing long trips during the night in Costa Rica, especially if you're not a local. We have very narrow and poorly maintained roads.
And yeah you drove by the Cerro de la Muerte (Death Mountain) at night. That’s a big no-no! That road is always almost coveted with fog (even during the day).
Wait, so the actual proper name of the mountain I crossed, at night, under heavy fog, translates as Death Mountain?? Actually yeah, that seems pretty sensible based on what I saw. Clearly I was lucky to make it through without suffering a disaster of some kind. On the one hand I fully acknowledge that I was an idiot to put myself in that situation... but on the other hand it sounds really badass, so this detail is definitely getting added to the story whenever I tell it in future.
North Texas has some really bad roads that I've seen, especially if you go through a country road
I wouldn't say worst because it is a beautiful drive but it is gnarly.... the road to Hana on the island of Maui, in the Nation of Hawaii (currently occupied by the United States).