The Taylor Highway and the Spare Tire

The Taylor highway is 160 miles in length; the last 100 miles of it unpaved. It runs from Tetlin Junction near Tok, Alaska northward to Eagle, Alaska. It was cut over the winter of 1945-1946. Three times it climbs to elevations over 3500’ before finally descending into Eagle at 908’. The road is rough, and isolated; a spare tire is a must…

I dropped my spare tire at mile 25. I heard it hit the asphalt, and briefly spotted it careening off into the woods out of my side view mirror. It appeared that those ultra strength zip ties on the underside of the truck bed had grown tired of supporting their burden, and jettisoned the spare tire from beneath the truck when I sailed over a steep bump and corresponding dip in the road caused by a frost heave.

I stopped as soon as I could and back tracked up the road to the base of the frost heave. Looking down hill, over the drainage, an interesting physics problem presented itself: How far does a 50 pound tire, rolling and bouncing at 60 mph, penetrate into a previously burnt boreal forest of black spruce and muskeg? It turns out not very far, but that didn’t stop me from searching for the damn thing a quarter mile from the road.

My initial excitement over the situation caused me to forgo all of the search training and tracking skills I have learned…which isn’t a lot, but any structured effort would have been a better approach than my frantic running through the forest ‘hoping’ I’d find it. This hope came from the optimism I try to have during actual search and rescue missions. Optimism keeps morale high and creates the mindset that you can and will find your subject. However, I was replacing this optimism with blind faith. Something to the affect that if I believed hard enough the spare tire would manifest itself on the other side of that black spruce tree. This concept has failed to work on multiple occasions.

After my impulsiveness slowed down, I reassessed the situation, and this time tried to be clever. I deduce exactly which frost heave cause the spare to rip loose and then re-drove the road, dropping an orange bouncy ball at the exact moment the car again reacted severely to the same sharp hump in the road that caused the spare to drop. My thinking was that the orange ball would follow approximately the same path as the spare. All I had to do was watch where it went. The downside to this plan was that I had barely seen the spare tire rolling across the road at 60 mph, so there was little chance that I’d be able to follow a little bouncy ball out of my side view mirror. Well, that realization came a little too late. Thanks Mom for the bouncy ball, but it’s now made its home 50 feet off of the Taylor highway near mile marker 25.

My next bit of cleverness was to ‘track’ the tire’s path into the forest. If I could just find one bent over weed or cracked twig on a shrub then I could delineate the cone of the tire’s path. If I could find two signs of the tire’s path, then I’d have a line which I could simply follow it to its vulcanized rubber terminus. Well, I found a plant laying over that looked very promising. I got all excited and rejoiced in my cleverness only to be stumped as I moved downhill from the plant to realize that the wall of shrubs that the tired ‘must of’ rolled through had absolutely no sign of huge spare tire crashing through it. I realized that the plant was probably knocked by me from my earlier footsteps of the initial frenetic search. Cleverness was now 0 for 2.
When I finally calmed down enough to stop being so impulsive and clever, I started grid searching the area. Going back and forth in increments just large enough to be sure I would be able to spot a tire on either side of me. I found the tire in 20 minutes. Add that to the 40 minutes of me acting like an idiot, and it only took 1 hour to find the spare.

I got a flat 40 miles later.