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Over the weekend my wife and I spent some time in southern Utah exploring old ghost towns and enjoying some time together. Fortunately, she likes tooling around the back roads with me. We visited one of the most photographed ghost towns in the country just outside of Zion National Park, but the weather wasn’t very good on Saturday and the dirt roads were like driving on marbles. It was very slick.
Yesterday, on our way home the weather was beautiful, so we decided to explore the southwestern route home to Salt Lake City. Neither of us had been that way before, so I looked at the GPS on my trusty iPhone and decided our route. It was a beautiful drive for the first several hours. We saw some scenery that we hadn’t seen before and ultimately wound up in Beryl, UT, an old train stop—and the end of the paved road.
Not one to easily retreat and backtrack, I turned the Jeep onto the well graded dirt road and headed to the next spot on the GPS, Minersville. It didn’t take long before I realized I had probably made a mistake. It had snowed the day before and we were not only riding on marbles, we were sliding all over the place. At one point we slid off the main part of the road and it looked like we were going to be stuck. I didn’t have my shovel or anything else that I would have needed for these types of conditions and started to wonder if my plan was going to put the whole adventure at risk. We were 30 or 40 miles away from civilization, it was cold and there was no way to dig the Jeep out.
A few minutes of reminding myself to be patient and we were back on the marbles again. A couple hours later we were back on easily travel-able dirt and before long were on the highway. Covered in mud, but glad to be out of trouble, we pointed the Jeep north and headed back for home.
Projects don’t always work out the way we anticipate, in fact, I think that’s true most of the time. It’s easy to wind up on an old dirt road, riding on marbles, trying to keep the Jeep on the road. Sometimes, it makes sense to take a step back, regroup and rethink the next steps. It might even be a good idea to retreat and try another route. Pivoting isn’t failure, it’s taking a look at the goal, determining if you’re on the right road to make it safely to your destination and making any needed corrections before you’re in big trouble.
Of course getting stuck in the mud on a service road alongside the railroad tracks isn’t a matter of life and death. In fact, we later saw a UPRR worker headed back where we had just been, so we would have had some help, but we would have saved a couple of hours if I hadn’t been so stubborn and had made the smart decision to backtrack and stay on the paved road.
I was motivated to take the most direct route to our destination. Had conditions been better, it would have been a fun adventure. As it was, we added unnecessary time and took some additional risks that didn’t provide the intended reward. Fortunately, my trusty Jeep pulled us through.
Have you ever had to regroup, rethink and retreat?
