This picture violates CC’s protocol for top-of-post images that I have been pushing all our contributors to follow: The featured car must be prominent in the photo so as to be easily identifiable, especially for the majority of folks who read CC on their phones. But there’s a reason I’m doing this, as I almost didn’t see there was a car here when we hiked by in these very remote woods south of the Rogue River. But the glint of light on the still-chromed bumper and the two front fenders made their presence known, and we detoured off the trail to check it out. Yes, it was the remains of a car. But how did it get here? There was no road in the immediate vicinity.
And yes, I shot close-ups of the remains. But I haven’t yet seriously tried to identify it, so help yourselves.
Here it is from the front, with a fallen tree draped over the two peaked front fenders.
The driver’s side fender still has the free-standing headlight nacelle attached. These headlights and the shapes of the fenders narrow the year of this car roughly to the 1934-1937 period. I didn’t get a good shot of it, but the passenger side fender had provision (cutout) for a side-mount spare tire.
Here’s the view from the side.
The steering column still maintained its upward angle.
And the handbrake is also still upright and has kept this car from rolling down the hill for untold decades.
The frame has cruciform bracing members between the main side rails.
The gas tank is a bit worse for wear. But the car’s blue paint has held up quite well.
The rear bumper is in quite good condition still. Now you may be wondering what I was: What happened to the body and drive train? Poking around in the undergrowth next to the car I did find a fair amount of flat sheet metal, some pieces bent in half. One piece had a stamped opening, a window most likely. Car bodies back then were built up of lots of fairly small pieces. The body seems to have either sort of collapsed but more likely sections of its sheet metal were harvested to be repurposed. It’s clearly not all here. As to the engine, transmission and rear axle, your guess is as good as mine.
The answer is probably related to the answer as to how it got here. This is a very remote area; we did not see one single other person or car the whole day. But somewhat surprisingly, there was often more human activity in these remote areas many years ago than there is now. There were logging camps and some mining operations. Curiously, the car sits in a lovely stand of old growth trees that have never been harvested. But there were logged areas not far away. So presumably at one time…this car got pushed here, having had its drivetrain removed, or that was done later. I have no easy answers.
As a frame of reference, we were hiking to Snow Camp Lookout, a former fire lookout deep in the Rogue River National Forest. We keep our little Chevy Tracker in Port Orford and use it for back country exploring. There were some serious washouts from the winter rains, so its ground clearance and 4WD was pretty much essential on this trip early in the season.
The wildflowers everywhere were in peak bloom.
We had never seen these yellow variants of wild irises which are typically shades of lilac, pink and magenta.
The hiking trail to the lookout is three miles long. The lookout is at about 4200′, so there’s quite a bit of a rise above the sea in the background where we started our drive. And its name is of course apt, as there’s plenty of snow up here in the winter. In fact the gate to the road we took had just been opened, but the gate up the last stretch to the lookout was still closed.
The views were stellar in every direction, which of course explains the fire lookout. I didn’t aim that way, but the snowy peaks of the Siskiyou Mountains on the California-Oregon border were very visible.
We decided to make a loop of it and walked back via the road which goes through the bleached skeletons of an old burn. The undergrowth is like a rock garden, and everything was in bloom.
The creeping version of ceanothus was like a carpet of blue.
We drove a different road back too, including some challenging washouts. This is how I love to spend my time: driving on remote and challenging terrain, hiking through wildflower-filled meadows and big trees, and sumitting a mountain. Life is good. Now we just need to identify that car…
If you were a YouTuber you undoubtedly would have had that car running in half an hour and driven it out of there, saving you a long walk.
I have no idea on the car besides that it’s a blue one. But the scenery is spectacular, the weather too seems just about perfect for hiking, not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny, not too dark…
Indeed the chrome and paint are top rate .
I used to love hiking, thank yu for sharing these glorious pictures Paul .
-Nate
Beautiful images.
I remember reading a National Geographic article as a child, that stunned me, at the time. Society as a whole, was not careful at all, how they disposed of garbage. Homesteaders and later farmers, and homeowners, into the twentieth century, would dump garbage, or dead livestock, virtually anywhere on their property. Or on public land. Including immediately right around their homes. Being careless with garbage, was not an exclusively modern problem.
I’ve discovered abandoned cars, in not so deep forests. Where there is usually a back road, reasonably close. Not as remote, as your example.
Great hike, and splendid photos. Nice to see Stephanie and the Tracker making appearances.
About that car, I’m leaning towards GM and I think the distinctive back bumper is the key. The closest I’ve found is 1937 LaSalle but that’s not quite it.
It appears the headlights were mounted on the catwalks, not the radiator surround. I’m no carspotter for that era, but that indicates late 30s to me. I’ve never noticed single side-mounts before.
Do they burn off the hill regularly to maintain the view?
Do they burn off the hill regularly to maintain the view?
No. The lookout is on a rocky knoll, above the trees. That was a forest fire a bit below.
Is it possible it’s a light truck? Centrally mounted handbrakes were pretty much passé on passenger cars by the mid Thirties, but they persisted in trucks much longer. All I remember seeing was pistol-grip handles mounted under the dash. Buick pioneered the step-on parking brake in 1941.
The bumpers don’t look very trucklike, however. I dunno.
The handbrake, spare tire mounting, fender horn location, “X” frame style, gas tank, and fenders look like a 1935 Terraplane from the Hudson Motorcar Company. Probably used by criminals and stashed away?
In the second photo, it looks like the front bumper is straight across, not dipped in the middle like the Hudson’s. I don’t see this car’s two lines across the rear bumper on the Hudson. The bracket for the headlight stanchion looks right, though.
How about 1936 Terraplane? Straight front bumper, rear bumper has those lines and the bolt holes are in this correct position, and it has the handbrake in the middle. And a side mounted spare.
I won’t suggest or correct, but I’m impressed by your display of what we Curbivores call scholarship
The 1936 looks right to me. Kudos to you. We must send PN back with a weedeater for better photos.
That is some pretty trippy verdure. For some reason it bothers me less seeing an occasional abandoned vehicle out in the middle of nowhere than a garbage dump. Abandoned cars are entropic reminders the everything eventually returns back to the earth and for some reason I find that very comforting.
Thanks for taking us all along on you hike.✌️
In the late 1980s, my family and I moved to the beautiful Arkansas Ozarks, and my job involved traveling to many of the small towns in the northwest corner. On one of the first trips I made between the Pea Ridge Battlefield and the historic, scenic town of Eureka Springs, I glanced off the side of the mountainside road and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the grill work, bumper, and headlight of an early 1950s (’53?) Buick. I got to know a couple of people who lived in Eureka, and they both remembered hearing stories about it years before, but no details they could recall. As I drove through there every week, I noticed that after a few years, it was only visible during the wintertime, and by the time I moved away some 15 years later, it was no longer visible at all. I can well imagine that it would’ve taken a huge crane to lift it out of there, and the only flat place was the state highway, and I can’t imagine anybody allowing them to tie it up for the time it would have taken just to get a car out of the ravine. I understand that they have widened parts of that road since I left, and I can’t help but wonder if they ever extracted the old car from the trees and the weeds.
Saw this near North Conway, NH in the middle of the woods.
Thank you for the yellow irises! I have them near my house, but I used to ride my horses up to see them. I no longer have my horses, and hiking at this age is not for me. I have also seen lots of abandoned old cars in the logging timber lands just west of Salem where I am. Its been years ago, but I’m sure they are still there somewhere. Very cool to come across them, wondering if they ran off the roads or were pushed off.
I lived in New Jersey for several years in the early 60’s. There was a “woods” at the end of the street, now a park I believe. At the time it seemed like it was a couple of miles long, in reality probably only a quarter to half a mile. Anyway, within it was the remains of a dump truck it appeared, probably in an accident, it looked like it was up against a tree at a 45 degree angle. No road nearby, only trees, fairly dense. Yes I was a kid in single digit years, but still somewhat analytical. I saw no possible way that could have gotten in there, either under it’s own power or supplemental. Then again, at that age I had no idea how fast or slow trees grew. Still hard to figure out…
I’m thinking the trees were much smaller, or not there at all, when the car was dumped there.