The late Kate Wolfe, a traditional folk voice of the seventies, had a song that I dearly love about Pacheco, a pass I have been up and down a hundred or more times.  On the same album she sang a song about a Red-Tailed Hawk where she mentions the "Golden, rolling hills of California".  When I think about California nowdays, I don't see beaches or palm trees...I see those rolling hills of central California in the morning sun;  they are covered with wheat- colored grass and that early light turns them into a bright gold.  On the east side of Pacheco, as you drop down out of the pass, you go by the San Luis Reservoir, a huge  body of water.  The blue of the clear sky reflects a deeper, richer blue off the water and the combination of the grass, the hills, the water, and the sky creates an almost unbelievably vivid "kodak" moment. 

There are other places where the hills take on that golden hue at the right times... Between Paso Robles on Highway 101 and Lost Hills on I5 there are some really sweet views.  Another of my favorites is the Monterey area, especially along Highway 68 between Monterey and Salinas.  Part of that drive borders what used to be the eastern edge of Fort Ord.  The tall, steep, round hills that were on Fort Ord were part of the Drivers Training Range (DTR) 4 and 5. 

Convoys of up to twenty trucks with two students in each truck would wind around the base of those tall hills.  They were too steep for the trucks to drive up them (well, for the student drivers to attempt it, anyway) but they made perfect vantage points for the instructors to watch the progress of the convoys and identify problems or bottlenecks.  We would race our jeeps up the steep slopes, bouncing, slewing, throwing rocks, and often getting air over the bumps and ruts.  Once on top, we could see miles of the convoy routes and everything that was going on.

It was a heck of a job;  we spent six to eight hours a day riding herd on the student convoys.  We each had our own jeep;  sometimes we doubled up but usually we rode solo.  We ran from choke-point to choke-point, solving little problems, encouraging reluctant students, and just blasting around off-road...and we got paid for it. 

On one misty morning, after a night of rain and fog, we were on the longest route, DTR 5,  chasing down problems as usual.  One of the trucks developed a problem and the senior NCO decided to take it back to the shop.  He put the students in my jeep and another instructor's jeep.  The plan was to rotate them at lunch so they would still get a chance to drive.  In the meantime, they got the ride of their lives as we barrelled along to catch up with the convoy.

At the farthest stretch of the route was one of the tallest hills.  I took a small trail that paralleled the route and then veered off toward the tall hill.  I was not too concerned about the moisture;  the dirt was hard-packed and not prone to sloppy mud...I thought I could reach the top easily.  I was wrong on two counts.  One - mud doesn't have to be sloppy to be slippery...and two - the standard military tread, called "non-directional mud and snow tires" are actually more efficient in sloppy mud.  Not to belabor the point too much, I built up a good head of steam and started up the hill on a lateral approach.  About three-quarters of  way up, the trail turned to the left and made a direct pitch to the top.  I was about half-way from the turn to the top when the jeep began to lose traction.  The jeep was slowly losing ground;  the wheels were still spinning at about twenty miles per hour but the jeep was barely moving at walking speed.  I did all the off-road magic that I was so good at:   I varied the throttle, speeding up and slowing down;  I turned the wheel to the left and right;  I tapped the brake while the wheels were spinning (it is supposed to change the drive wheel from one side to the other) but nothing made any difference.  I realized I wasn't going to get to the top...which shouldn't have been too much of a problem but for the fact that the trail was not wide enough to turn around on and had a pretty hefty drop off on one side and when the jeep quit moving forward, it started sliding backward...even though the wheels were still spinning forward. 

I put in the clutch and hit the brake but that didn't slow the jeep's backward progress in the least;  in fact, it actually picked up a little speed.  I let off the brakes (a turning wheel provides more control than a sliding one) and started paying more attention to where the jeep was actually going.  I tried feathering the brake to avoid a total runaway, but not much was helping the situation;  we were picking up speed backwards down a very steep hill. 

I was most concerned about the upcoming turn in the trail;  if we were going too fast, it would be challenging.  A fact the student in the passenger seat continued to inform me of constantly...in between his demands to know what I intended to do about it....interspersed with his girlish screams.

The turn was coming up fast and I was out of good ideas and was considering some bad ones, including a bailout.  I actually liked the one idea of kicking the student out, but before I could make a decision the turn was there and I had to do something.  Right at the point where I was ready to join my passenger in two-part harmony, the left-rear wheel hit a semi-large rock, one I had never noticed before, and the jeep skewed to the left, the front end slid around and voila:  we were pointed downhill, going in the right direction, and the slide had bled off some of the speed so we were pretty much in control.  The lateral approach was not so steep and although it was still building up speed, the jeep was not going so fast that I couldn't get it back under control as we got to the bottom. 

My student passenger was totally out of control, however, and as soon as I got the jeep back onto the route at a normal speed, he started threatening to turn me in for almost killing him.  I was thinking that this was a case when "almost" just wasn't good enough.  But instead I told him if he ratted me out I would tell his classmates that he had screamed and cried like a little girl all the way down. 

Truthfully, I wasn't too concerned about getting in trouble;  each of the instructors on our team had done much worse many times before and our boss, SFC Machado (his name says it all) would just look at us and shake his head and say that we ought not to do stuff like that all the time...just sometimes, with a wink.

I had been up that stupid hill dozens of times;  at one point it had a little natural ramp that would send you airborne (going uphill) if you hit it at about 40 mph.  I just had never tried it when the conditions were so slick.  It was a little scary for a minute, but the pilots say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one, so this was a good hill-climb.