MAY 01, 1994

CRASH

I needed a break. It had been a long climb up Hogback Mountain. The climb to the top at 2,410 feet was long and steady from Marlboro VT. At the summit, I stopped at a closed ski lift. Right before I got back on the road for the coast down the nountain, a truck heading eastward pulled into the parking lot with steam coming out from the hood. The driver asked me if I had seen where there was a water spigot and I told them that I didn't know where one was. I didn't really have a lot of water to spare and what I had wouldn't even had made a dent inside of the radiator.

I pulled back into the road for the long coast down heading westward to Wilmington. I needed the rest because there would be a couple more climbs to go over on the way to Bennington and over the Appalachian Trail. About halfway down the hill, I came across a lot of stopped traffic. It turns out that there was a car-truck crash. A lady and her daughter had been seriously injured because the station wagon they had been driving in going eastward had slided and hit a truck going westward.

I asked one of the police officers who allowed me to walk through the accident site and he told me that the accident was caused by something slippery on the road. I asked him if maybe oil might have caused it. He said that this was a good possibility. I told him about the truck that I had seen on top of the mountain with the steaming radiator. There was a possibility that the truck overheated because it had lost a lot of its oil while going up the hill. I gave the officer all the information I could remember about the truck.