Roads and trails in the Mohave

These comments are from Ingo Cyliax, who drove part of the first DPG route on October 16/17, 2004. See also Ingo's photographs

General Impressions

My initial reaction of the first leg of the course are "we're crazy". The first leg littered with washes and ruts, and the hill it went over was pretty hard to navigate. I think we figure out where Team Red stopped, and there were worse sections after that.

We couldn't figure out the section of the course between I40 and I15, since there were a lot of little roads and I didn't have a GPS sync'ed moving map to help. Also, there were some private properties we couldn't go through.

We did a section from kingston road to the end of the course, which was rugged, but not as bad as the first section. Lot's of rocks, and some deep washes. The road through them was filled up, including the wash at WP2120. I can see how after a good flood the road will wash out and away and you end up with something that looks like the course describes in the waypoint list, but in our case it went straight through.

On the way back we went from SR127 through to I15 (backwards), this includes a few mountains with tight switchbacks. The road is pretty good in most places, however, in one section, there were a lot of sharp rocks and we lost a tire. There were also a couple of sand traps on the road in other sections.

One note, you can't go fast in many of the tight places and definately not on the first leg of the course. In general, it was hard to go any faster than 20-30Mph, except some places where the road is packed. However, even in those sections there were ruts and washouts that occur without warning, i.e. they blend into the road visually.

More Impressions

while I was driving the course I tried to keep in mind what I was reasoning, in order of concern.

  1. Keep the car on the road, what is the road ?
  2. Am I going too fast (i.e. what would happen if there is a rut or wash behind the next crest/turn, how fast could I stop ?
  3. Am I going to bottom out the car or hang it up.
  4. Can I stop here, or do I need to use my momentum to get through.
  5. Avoid rocks/bolder at edge of road that could puncture sidewall.
  6. Which branch should I take.
  7. Car health are we over heating. Do I have anough fuel to go ahead. Do I have enough fuel to turn back, if needed.
  8. Gee, just changed the tire, if we lose another we have to hike out (1-2 days).

Also, here are some thoughts.

  1. 200 miles in 10 hrs = 20Mph, we have to go faster than that to make up for the slow sections. More suspension travel would allow to transit smaller ruts and washes. At some point creature comfort is the limit on how fas you go (i.e. washboards, odd angles). An estimate is that we ended up doing half the course, in about 6-7 hours, but we'll have to tally up the miles, since I'm not counting the times we had to backtrack and correct.
  2. You almost need a 3D terrain map to figure out how to plan the best route and position on the road. At least in my mind I was trying to infer what the wash was like and how deep it should be based on what other washes looked like that I already went through.
  3. In a few places lose sand covered up ruts or hard edges, so I ended up hitting hard and bottoming out the suspension.
  4. Some of the sections that were straight and level had sand and lose gravel, which made driving on them "squishy". I.e. the speed was limited to what I felt was safe by the steering reaction time to keep the vehicle on the road.
  5. Some of the steep downhills were tricky because they had lose gravel on them. If you tried to brake, you just kept sliding and the steering was really squishy. I can see where it's easy to have a runaway situation where you can't stop/slow down without losing control.
  6. The edges of the road usually had high shoulders or burms from when they ran a grader through it and pushed the rocks to the sides.
  7. In the mountainous sections, the edge of the road goes straigh down the mountain. I.e. if you accidentually get off the road you're going down the hill fast.

Photo pa162953

This image [is] one of the best. See if a vision algorithm can make sense of this. Hint: there are three roads here. BTW, with a camera that has high dynamic range, you should be able to make out some details in the shadow. When it's sunny, there is enough scatter to illuminate the shadows. On overcast days, there are no shadows and the light level is not much lower than in the shadows on a sunny day. [you could probably simulate the dynamic range of a video camera, by assuming you get about 6-8bits of levels. the camera I was using is supposed to be getting 10-12bits/color, but probably less than that.] You can make a historgram of the camera image and adjust the level to get good distribution in the areas of the image you are interested in. Another way around this, is to have two (or more) cameras with exposures (levels) adjusted to give a continous range. I.e. one camera is for looking in shadows and the other for looking at non-shadows. Fill lighting for shadows will be a problem. Laser might be OK, if they are bright and you use a filter on the camera to only pass the laser color. E.g. infrared.

Photo pa162942

This is a picture of a wash. what's interesting is, that it was a pretty deep wash and the picture doesn't really reflect how bad it was. You can get kind of an idea of it by looking at the features off the side of the road.