OK folks I know over the years folks question others driving conditions and vehicle use ect. Well as some many Know I live in and work in the country so I drive 40 miles of gravel County roads daily 4-5 days a week. It has been raining here this week on and off and I just happened to have the camera in hand yesterday and snapped some pics of my DDer 2010 1500 hemi after running my usual daily work run after ONLY a 1/4 inch of rain. It gets way worse at times. I did require 4X4 in 2 mile long stretches where they are pulling shoulders back up to the road surface so there is a lot of dirt and grass on the road top making it really slippery.

It is fairly clean in these pics, if it was a good rain there would be mud chunks on the hood and windshield and the front bumper would be covered in mud along with what you see here. This isn't bad at all even considering the rain washed of a lot of mud overnight before I snapped these pics.

 

This is a normal look for it a lot of the time. Notice what has plopped off of it and has run off of it from just sitting in front of my house from the rain over night giving it a natural car wash.

Went to town for some groceries and a supper date with my lovely and while leaving the grocery store we had about an hours worth of sun just before sundown and caught this view of mother nature.

 

Draught????? Not here.  
 

I've brought a lot of that ND mud home with me stuck in the fenderwells....bumpers, skid plates. Last time I was out there I think the truck came home a couple hundred pounds heavier. I've also been the victim of those car swallowing mud/sink holes that form on a otherwise pretty decent gravel road. That made for a long walk to find help.

At work it is a daily ordeal, our clay I think is about the slickest and stickiest material on the planet when wet.

The last 10 years the gravel road conditions have only gotten worse now that most farmers have gone to full sized semis and you know not a single one is legal weight either, the roads are showing this more and more every year.

I thought legal weight was when it starts spilling over the top of the trailer.

That's how it goes, can't say we were any different when I was still farming.

It be cool to have one of those undercarriage truck washers that you drive thru. Don't know it you've seen them. they spray from almost every direction at the undersides. Way to keep the driveway clean anyhow.

We have one of those pickup washes in our equipment wash bay at work and it creates a headache for our pickup mechanic. It has so much pressure and since it sprays up from the floor along with top and both sides it actually gets things wet that would never get wet normally and causes him added work from wet fuse panels ect.

We also have a drive on ramp for getting pickup undersides washed better with the hand operated steam cleaner/ pressure washer. I would never run my personal rig through the 4 sided hoop washer at work after seeing what it does with our work pickup fleet.

I do the easy thing. I lay a sprinkler on the ground. Drive over the top of it and pause for several moments and inch forward. Pause for more time and repeat till I get from front bumper to rear bumper. That's the poor man method. As for me now I use the power washer and creeper. I just roll under and get underside cleaned up. But if I got several day of dirt road travel then I wait till a week and then do this on the weekends.

I know exactly what you mean W&F;  since I've been going there sometimes twice per hunting season since '99.  Sometimes, I swear, I've brought back several hundred pounds of NoDak road dirt when it's been wet up there.  

 

A lot of those gravel roads up there are much smoother than the POS asphalt roads we have down here.