On a holiday weekend however, the clouds of dust from passing vehicles makes that option unpleasant.Ĭamp. You always have the choice of walking along the road instead, which is an easier go. By the time you get back to your rig, it’s time to consider just what mixture of dust and cinders you want to bring in with you, if any. The other thing such walking produces is fine dust wafting all over your shoes and lower extremities. This absorbs enough extra energy that you’ll find yourself preferring to find a suitable tireprint to follow. Walking on them produces a pea gravel crunch that’s like listening to the soundtrack of a murder mystery show, where someone is walking on the gravel drive of a British manor house. You can’t avoid what you can’t see.ĭriving over them makes for an interesting hissing sound as they try to squirm out from under the tires, and I imagine that the extra power needed to push through must have overheated one or two ATVs over the years. That’s because ATVers have made several very deep circular dishes in the black cinders, and it would be all too easy to dive or topple into one. Bonus caution: arriving in the dark is risky if you explore the area in between the trees and the flat, where I am. If it acts as a lubricant, it may become easier to sink in. The second caution is that I don’t know how rain affects the tractive nature of the cinders. Some areas on the other side of the road posed much more challenging situations, however. By sticking to flat areas where pathways had packed down somewhat, several fifth-wheels and bumper-pulls made it in without any problem at all. Combine that with an incline and lightly-loaded drive wheels, and you could have a situation. That said, I’d still advise caution on two fronts, one being that cinder depth can vary greatly. I was initially concerned about taking the heavy Intrepid over the deep wavelets of cinders, but this proved to be no problem at all in 2WD. Drive like there is snow on the road when there is snow on the road.If there’s one thing the motorcyclists love, it’s rocketing along the flats. Remember – we live in a winter-snow-ice town. You may not see the roads as dry and ice free as in past years. So the city is going to use only cinders this winter. Is it worth the cost in the damage to the environment and property? The current City Council said no. Does salt work better for de-icing the roads? Yes. However, even though salt is believed to help prevent accidents, the statistics did not present a dramatic case for its use.Ĭinders may be ugly but they don’t kill trees and they don’t damage concrete or the underside of vehicles. On the side favoring the use of salt, city staff presented statistics comparing the number of vehicle collision on snow days for the five years before and after the salt switch. There are arguments both pro and con on this issue. Other cities are experiencing the same issues and many that had switched to salt are now returning back to cinders or sand. You may have seen damage to your concrete driveway. We also now know that city salt is killing pine trees on private property. Salt is showing up in the Rio de Flag riverbeds and in drainage channels and in the soil along the roads. The pine trees along city roadways are dying from a 1,000 percent increase in salt in their needles. We see that happening in Flagstaff today. What the Council didn’t know at the time was that the salt would kill pine trees and ruin concrete. So in 2007 the City Council decided to switch from cinders to salt. It was “cleaner” than cinders, which are dusty and clog storm drains. Conventional wisdom was that salt worked better for de-icing the roads. At that time, the City Council (before my tenure) was told that a sodium solution was superior to cinders and that many western cold-weather cities were changing to salt. “Never buy a used car from Michigan, its underside will be rotted from salt.”īut things changed six years ago. Back then we even criticized the states that used salt. They were messy and a nuisance to clean up, but they worked. In my first 36 years in Flagstaff, cinders were the norm.
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