The Accident
Here's where this trip report goes south- so here's a group puppy photo to lighten things up
After Lippincott my fiancée asked me if she could drive the remainder to Saline Warm Springs so she could get some wheel time before the end of the trip. We had planned to go Eureka Dunes the next day via Steele Pass and that would be too technical for her comfort zone.
A few miles down from the road we reach a crested slight left turn. My fiancée apexes a little early and the car begins to fishtail ever so lightly. She attempts to counter steer her way through the turn, but being lifted and top heavy with our spare + gear + extra fuel the weight transfer on the car is very apparent and steering input is crucial. By the second countersteer our rear tire hits the outer burm of the road and I feel the back end hop and the car starts to roll... as the car comes to a hault I try to stay calm throughout- no time to think about what-ifs or shoulda coulda's, I need to make sure my family is OK.
I find myself kissing the the roof of the car but I'm able to unbelt myself with ease. I hear a scream from my fiancée and I immediately get sick to the stomach. I've heard my fiancée scream before, sometimes because a spider gets in the room and sometimes even in jest, but this is a scream that I have not yet been acquainted with- it was blood curdling. I relunctantly look over, but miraculously she had no visual injuries and was not pinned in any way. I make sure she has no neck/back injuries before unbelting her and pulling her out of the car. Immediately we embrace but we notice that our puppy is gone.
I tell my friend who was following us to flag down some help as my fiancée and I spend the next 3-4 hours tracking paw prints throughout the desert and mountain terrain. We should have probably better evaluated ourselves, but we were running on adrenaline and needed to find our dog. The second half of our crew met up with us on their KTMs and went off road to aid the search
As I walked back to the wreck I noticed our car was flipped right side up. A man walks over and introduces himself as Luke (owner of 4X4Labs), serendipitously he was on holiday in DV as well. He mentions that while we were gone he flipped our car over with his LC100. He quickly took the helm and devised a plan on getting our car out of DV. One of the tires popped the bead so we swap out the spare and made sure we had pressure on the rest. Steering was good, driveline was straight, and brakes still worked- the truck was towable.
As the sun began to set, someone noticed a dark figure approaching the crash site- it was our dog. This was unreal, we made it out of the wreck virtually unscathed and our dog found his way back to us. We quickly packed what we could then headed to Saline Warm Springs to camp for the night.
