Some friends and I went hiking yesterday at Winter Creek - Mount Zion near Los Angeles, CA. This marked only the second time hiking I’ve hiked around L.A. The pic on the right is me posing as a bear running out of the cave.
The hike will be memorable for a number of things: 1) It was a great hike with friends as we saw parts of California that we hadn’t seen before and the majority of our hike was in the shade, and 2) we had a close brush with death afterwards, while driving down the mountain.
The road up the mountain to the hiking trail was two-way, but one lane each way (separated by two solid yellow lines). This was a winding road with guard rails overlooking the cliff on one side and the mountain forming the other side. There were various points where the road was winding up the mountain that you couldn’t see ahead. It was presumed that as long as you were going slow enough (< 25 mph) and staying in your lane, then everything should be fine. Usually, when I have people in the car, I drive slower than usual to offset the attention deficit that can occur while driving and talking/listening at the same time. Well, this genius of a driver in an early 90’s Mustang GT somehow thought it was good idea to take up part of our lane while the road was winding. When we saw him, he was maybe a foot in our lane and we had just missed a head-on collision by perhaps a foot. I’m not sure if I was able to brake as there likely was not enough time to react. The stunned silence in the car afterwards couldn’t do justice to what we had just experienced.
Last night when I reflected back on the hiking trip and the close encounter, I wondered what would’ve happened if certain things had been different. We were driving 20-25 mph and he had to be driving 35-40 mph. If there had a been a head-on collision (55-65 mph impact), the impact would’ve flipped at least one of the cars over and down the cliff (the term “guard rails” is a misnomer). Although I’m no expert, I’d put the odds of no fatalities in that situation at probably less than 20%. You start playing the “what-if” game: What if I had been driving 1 mph faster (or he had been driving faster)? What if he had been more than 1 foot in our lane? It was a stark reminder that so many things are out of our control. And our habit of marking successes and disappointments as landmarks–in hopes of deriving meaning–is folly.