A few of the bad roads of the Southwest are so rocky that you have literally to clamber over them, but about seventy per cent of the road across New Mexico and Arizona, in which I include the road across the Mohave Desert that I covered later, is a fair, and occasionally fast, natural road. The streams are generally easy to get through, and at those that are sandy or too deep, the automobile association keeps teams standing on purpose to see you through.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS ON DRIVING
Don’t try to drive from New York to San Francisco on high gear. You will often have used “first” by the time you strike the Rocky Mountains. Don’t, then, subject your bearings to an unnecessary strain by forcing your motor to labor as it must, if too steep a hill is taken on too high a gear. See that your hand brake can lock your wheels. On a five-mile grade one brake may burn out, and on most cars in this country the hand brake is next to worthless from lack of use and care. Letting the engine act as a brake is a good practice on long descents.
On going through sand or mud that looks as if it might stop you, change into a lower gear and don’t lose your forward momentum. It is easier to keep a car going than to start it again. Fording through streams instead of crossing on bridges is common in the Southwest and many of the streams have bottoms of quicksand character. Before fording a stream make sure that the water is not going to come above the height of your carburetor. Then start and stay in first until you are out on the other side. The idea is to go through at a constant speed with no jerk on the wheels.
In high altitude your carburetor will need more air, as there is less oxygen in a given volume of atmosphere than at sea-level. This means also that a gasoline motor has considerably less power in Colorado than at sea-level. Don’t be discouraged and think your car is failing you when you find that you have to crawl up a long hill in “second,” upon which you think you ought to “pick up” on “high.” Not only is your motor less powerful than at home, but the hill is steeper than it looks. When you get back to sea-level it will run as well as ever.
The hardest thing for a stranger to guess seven or eight thousand feet up in the air, is height, grade or distance. You see a little hill, a nice little gentle incline about half a mile long at most; then gradually from the elevation of your own radiator out in front of you, you get some idea of the steepness of grade and you find from your speedometer when you get to the top, that it was a short little stretch of three miles.
One other point: on high altitudes you will have to fill your radiator often. Water boils more quickly, and this added to the long stiff grades, will cause a lot of your cooling water to waste in steam—even in a car that at normal altitude never overheats.
In Order to Cross Here E. M. Built a Bridge with the Logs at the Right