Rivers and mud

[dpetersen]

Gday all!
I have a couple of questions in regards to driving through rivers and mud.
I live out at Kings Canyon, a few hours out of Alice Springs and we've had a heap of rain lately. I always take the Giles track when going into town. It's a 100K stretch of dirt road. If I stick to the bitumen it adds and extra 140ks to the trip.
Anyway, the other day heading into town the dirt road was pretty boggy, had it in high range a fair few times to get through the long stretches of water sitting on the road. I was generally trying to drive to the side of the water but I had a mate with me who said the ground will be harder in the middle of the puddle. What do you all think? Is it better to try and go around or through the middle?
In the middle of the Giles track there is the palmer river, which is generally always dry. Anyway we got there and it was about 1000mm deep (roughly door handle height) and we really didn't want to turn around and go back the long way. We walked through a couple of times and the water was flowing pretty hard, you couldn't stand still as it was that strong. Iv done plenty of creek crossings before but never anything like this. The river would be roughly 50 meters wide at this point. One mate said we should turn around and the other said to drive through. Long story short, ended up driving through in low range, no issues at all and everybody was happy. My question is, how do you know what's too high to drive through and what's flowing too fast to drive through?

[MudRunnerTD]

Is have thought if you can walk across without getting washed away your good to go kinda.

I agree with your mate about the water on the road, the hardest dirt is the road so stay on it and drive through the sitting water. I've been up that way when is wet as a shag and we had no trouble when we applied this rule. It was advice from the owner of Mt Dare and that was good enough for me.

River crossings are tricky. The depth is not that big a deal, don't stop. Keep your bow wave working. Walking through is good if it can be done, obviously if it's flowing faster than your comfortable to walk then you car ain't going through either.

At the end of the day though there is always tomorrow. Seriously.

[happygu]

Generally, the rule is, where if you can walk it - then it is OK, and if you can't - don't go.

We tried to cheat this once on the Thompson River, where it was high & fast flowing .... we walked out, and got to the middle where it was thigh deep and you couldn't move for fear of being washed away ...... lucky we were cautious and tied the cars together as a precaution, as the lead vehicle started to float away.

Needless to say, we don't try and cheat the rule anymore .... it is better to wait it out, as generally with no more rain about, within 24 hours the conditions become more favorable.

You need to use your judgement for driving through standing water, but in most cases it is always better to keep to the centre where the road has been compacted and is hard. Water will, in these cases try to erode the surface from the edges - the washaways don't usually start from the middle.

What you don't want to do, if possible, is drive with one side of the car in the water, and the other side out of the water. This is where a little bit of judgement comes into it - if you can't see the bottom, and it isn't obvious that it is only 2 inches deep, then I either try to keep all wheel in the water, or all wheels out depending on the situation. If there is a two foot deep hole, and I fall into it, I would rather keep the car as flat as possible rather than have one corner fall in ....

[macca]

For me a metre is getting a bit deep, but it does depend on bottom, flow and if anything solid like a tree is moving with the water.

Consider a 4x4 has 250 - 300mm clearance so the vehicle has 750mm water pushing on it, given some reasonable flow the side force could easily push you where you don't want to be.

Where you live I'm guessing you learn to drive those conditions and your experience will guide you.

Thanks for the interesting post too.

[dpetersen]

Thanks for all the replies.
I guess driving through the river is one of those things that has to be judged on a case by case basis. I like the idea of tying other cars together though to stop them floating away. When I get a winch I guess I could use the same princable with a tree. Very happy with the way the patrol had no issues after getting through it all and to see how much it's capable of. Will be in Darwin in a couple of weeks fishing so it'll be good to see how it goes up there in the mud after the wet season.