While on our way to Gateway River RV Park in Carbondale, our TomTom GPS had us taking this road to get there. Thank god my wife looked at Google Maps and saw this dead-end while we were still a good distance away! It was a long day of driving and backing our rig up a 1/4 mile uphill to the nearest intersection in order to turn around would not have been fun. If you have a smaller class B rig, turning around may not be so bad, but with 20 feet of truck and 30 feet of trailer it would have been no picnic. Just to complicate things further, the road here is relatively narrow.
All the roads out here include a lot of ups and downs in close succession, but when we came across this one we stopped in our tracks. It’s far steeper than any of the other grades we encountered in the area, the road narrows significantly at the bottom, and—to top things off—the lowest point was submerged by an inch or two of slowly moving running water. At first, we attempted to back up until we could find a turn around point and reverse course. However, we repeatedly had to stop due to other cars coming from both directions. At one point a local driving by rolled down his window and talked to us. He encouraged us to go forward because it’s ‘not as bad as it seems’. I guess he was right because we did decide to proceed forward, but we had real concerns about scraping the bumper of our 30′ Airstream while climbing the other side of the road. I found no evidence of scraping after we got home, but I would never again attempt to tow our rig across this point in this road. Unless you have a smaller rig (25′ or less), we recommend staying clear of this section of the road.
While on our way to Gateway River RV Park in Carbondale, our TomTom GPS had us taking this road to get there. Thank god my wife looked at Google Maps and saw this dead-end while we were still a good distance away! It was a long day of driving and backing our rig up a 1/4 mile uphill to the nearest intersection in order to turn around would not have been fun. If you have a smaller class B rig, turning around may not be so bad, but with 20 feet of truck and 30 feet of trailer it would have been no picnic. Just to complicate things further, the road here is relatively narrow.
All the roads out here include a lot of ups and downs in close succession, but when we came across this one we stopped in our tracks. It’s far steeper than any of the other grades we encountered in the area, the road narrows significantly at the bottom, and—to top things off—the lowest point was submerged by an inch or two of slowly moving running water. At first, we attempted to back up until we could find a turn around point and reverse course. However, we repeatedly had to stop due to other cars coming from both directions. At one point a local driving by rolled down his window and talked to us. He encouraged us to go forward because it’s ‘not as bad as it seems’. I guess he was right because we did decide to proceed forward, but we had real concerns about scraping the bumper of our 30′ Airstream while climbing the other side of the road. I found no evidence of scraping after we got home, but I would never again attempt to tow our rig across this point in this road. Unless you have a smaller rig (25′ or less), we recommend staying clear of this section of the road.
Here’s a video taken from our dashcam: https://youtu.be/EkHOW9sm_bk