This story, like so many of my stories, starts with taking the dogs for their regular morning walk. We walked down the driveway and then along the front of our property on Lavender Trail. The first thing we noticed when we reached the intersection with Fouche Gap Road was a set of three highway hazard triangles blocking access down into Texas Valley. We proceeded, wondering what we would find. Or, at least I wondered. The dogs probably not so much.

What we found was a tour bus that didn’t quite make it around the first hairpin curve down on that side of the mountain. This is what it looked like when we came back up. I think the driver kept his lunch in the compartment that’s open.

I asked the driver whether he was following a GPS. He said yes. If you happen to come from the south side of the mountain and want to get to some place in the valley, a GPS will usually route you over Fouche Gap Road. There is a perfectly good road with no sharp curves and no steep grades that can take you into the valley, but Fouche Gap is a good shortcut. This is the second time a vehicle too long to make the curves in this road has followed a GPS into disaster. Or at least a big inconvenience.

He had been taking six passengers to a farm in the valley that hosts weddings at a venue, as they say. Fortunately for the passengers, someone was coming up from the valley and could take them back down to the wedding venue. I know you’re wondering why they needed a bus that size for six passengers. Me, too, but I didn’t ask.

The front wheels of the bus were right at the edge of a fairly deep ditch. The back of the bus was scraping the pavement. He couldn’t come or go. I was a little surprised that he had made it up the south side of the mountain, because there is another serious hairpin curve on that side. The big difference is that that curve is closer to level, while the one that trapped the bus takes a steep dive down through the curve.

I suggested that he get a bulldozer, and then set his bus on fire and push it off the road, but he said he had already called for a big wrecker.

The dogs and I continued down to our normal turnaround, and then came back up. A couple of cars passed us on their way up. I tried to flag them down, but one couldn’t figure out what I wanted him to do. No worry. He found out soon enough.

The guy in the pickup that’s turning around in the photo above is someone I speak to when he passes me and the dogs. He stopped this time, and asked whether something was still across the road. I couldn’t quite understand what he said, but I figured he must be talking about the bus, so I said, “Yes.” Then he said he had brought his chain saw to get it off the road. I was a little puzzled by that, but as he drove off I called out, “That might work.” I think I meant,”That probably won’t work.” But then I replayed his words in my mind and realized he had asked about a tree across the road.

The big wrecker showed up just as I came back up to the bus.

I thought about staying to watch what happened. I think the wrecker was going to pick up the back of the bus and move it over. It would have been interesting to watch, in a large-machine-at-work kind of way, but I thought it might take a while. That was a good decision (on a day with some not so good decisions, fortunately not my own), because it was about two and a half hours later before I heard the wrecker and the bus come back to the top of the mountain.

A couple of months ago Leah and I were coming up the mountain and found the road blocked at the second hairpin curve on the south side. It was a big tractor-trailer truck carrying chickens. The driver said his GPS had routed him over Fouche Gap. The front of his truck was pushed up against the bank at the side of the road, and his trailer wheels were off the pavement, perilously close to a steep drop-off. The wrecker he called was probably the same size as the bus wrecker. It might even have been the same wrecker. In that case, we had to take the 10-mile detour out the nice, level, no-sharp-curve road into the valley and then up the far side to our house. I never found out how the truck driver got back off the mountain, but the truck was gone the next time we drove down, so he must have managed somehow.

On the bus job, the wrecker had backed down from the intersection at the top of the mountain, somewhere around a quarter to a third of a mile. When he got the bus unstuck, the bus driver had to back up to the top of the mountain. At least he wasn’t towing a trailer.

I think a sign on Huffaker Road warning of very sharp curves might save some trouble on Fouche Gap Road. I think I’ll suggest that to the county, even though it will reduce the drama on the mountain.