The one time I jumped an elk in my Camaro
100% true story
It was nearing 6 p.m. on a Friday in early July, and I was driving my ‘94 Chevy Camaro up the Ash Fork Summit toward Flagstaff, AZ. I was cruising along the two-lane highway a little faster than the 70 mph speed limit, passing cars and semi-trucks on the left.
The sun is still up but has fallen below the ridge of the mountain. The diminished light makes the shadows disappear, but not enough for headlights to have any effect. At that stage of near-twilight, everything flattens out, and I speed past all the cardboard cutouts of hillside cliffs and tall pines.
I’m approaching a red micro-compact car in the right lane, and the 18-wheeler that I just passed moved into the left lane behind me as he started to overtake the lunchbox on wheels. I sped up a little more to make some space between the truck and me knowing he’d want to keep the hammer down to not lose momentum on the incline.
I looked back in the rearview mirror once more to see how far back the semi-truck was and then moved my eyes front again. That’s when I saw it—a large, tan obstruction 300 yards in front draped nearly across my entire lane, but what was it?
At first, I thought it was a refrigerator box, but the shape was weird.
200 yards.
I squinted, “Is that a blanket?”
100 yards
“Oh shit, that’s a…!”
A large female elk was lying perfectly perpendicular to my lane, covering it from line to line. Its back faced me, and the placement almost seemed too perfect, as if someone killed it somewhere else and then laid it down in the road before I got there.
Hundreds of thoughts went through my head at once to figure out a solution to the impending collision, but I was stuck. The red compact car was now immediately to my right, so I couldn’t change lanes, and to my left was a steep embankment that went down thirty feet or more, so that wasn’t an option.
I could slam on the breaks, but that would make the nose of the car dip down. I don’t know if you remember what a nineties Camaro looked like, but it’s already got a sloped front end, and if I dipped the nose further as I hit the beast, it might destroy my car and me with it. Also, the semi-truck was less than fifty feet behind me, and his momentum might carry him all the way through the back of my car.
This post below is free to everyone in a week, but if you become a member, you can see it now!
There was only one choice. Press my right foot to the floor, pray to some ethereal entity for forgiveness, and then Dukes of Hazard my way through that enormous slab of carrion. I winced my eyes and held the wheel as firmly as I could.
50 feet… 25… 10… Buh-BANG! Bam!!
I was still on the road. Hell, I was still in my lane, and I was driving…straight? What the hell just happened? I didn’t dare look back or over to the red compact. I didn’t even know if he was still there next to me or not.
I listened for noises. Did I break a bumper? Did I destroy my transmission? Is my suspension okay? Everything felt normal.
I let go of the wheel for a few seconds, thinking I had killed the alignment, but the Camaro drove almost straighter than before. There was no fire, smoke, or bad smells… yet.
I slowed down and moved into the right lane, and then off to a turnout where I sat for ten minutes processing the near-death experience. I just ran over an adult elk; how am I not dead, or at least my car not destroyed? I was truly baffled, and when I calmed down, I got back on the road and headed into Flagstaff.
After a dozen more miles, I found the first exit into town and pulled off. At the top of the ramp, I found a spot to pull over and got out to inspect the car. The bumper was missing some paint but seemed to be okay. All of my tires were fine, and I couldn’t find any problems until I checked the chassis.
I grabbed my camp flashlight and got down to look under the car but was not prepared for the horror movie underneath, which explained the putrid smell of cooked venison. From the K-member holding the motor in place all the way back to the muffler, I shaved off a large swath of elk skin and meat and brought it with me to town.
But Flagstaff wasn’t my final destination.
I was driving through Arizona to reach Durango, Colorado, for a family reunion, which was another five hours away. For five hours, I endured the aroma of cooked elk flesh across mountain roads and high-desert valleys. I arrived in Durango just after 2 a.m., too late to find a bar to drink my sorrows away, not that anyone wanted to smell me next to them on a barstool.
When I got to Durango, it was too dark to find where my family was staying (pre-smartphone era), so I parked the Camaro on the side of the road and tried to sleep. For anyone wondering, NO, a ‘94 Camaro is not suitable for sleeping in.
I woke up around 6 a.m. from road noise, groggy, and with saddle sores from the stiff bucket seats. When I drove in, I remembered passing an open-stall car wash, so I started up the now battle-tested war machine and moved into the furthest stall possible.
Instead of washing the car, I grabbed the power sprayer and washed way as much of the cooked-on carnage as possible, and I got a lot of it off, but there would be elk skin and hair attached to this car for the rest of it’s life.
One small persistent piece seemed lodged against the transmission mount, so I jammed the sprayer up into the chassis until it finally fell off, but it wasn’t a small piece after all. A chunk the size of a rib-eye steak, pussy-green and cauterized, fell to the ground and splashed water in my face.
Traumatized, I hopped up quickly, did a quick wash around the car, and then hopped back in and drove off, leaving the meaty steak behind, but it wouldn’t take long for someone else to find it.
As I drove away, the car wash attendant, an older man in a trucker hat and a walrus mustache, trotted toward the stall, but I wasn’t sticking around to see his reaction. I hit the road, kicking rocks as I spun the tires and drove to find the solace of a cup of gas station coffee.
I finally found my family and shared my harrowing tale, earning me the nickname of The Deer Hunter. I suppose there are worse nicknames to receive, even if this one was shared in irony.
After the reunion, I drove the twelve hours back home smelling of deer bacon. The following day, I took the car to Jiffy Lube for an oil change and to check for significant damage to the undercarriage.
While I waited for my car to be finished, I called my friend and told him the story because I knew he would find it hilarious. As I was sharing the story, the guy in the service pit changing my oil leaped out the back to take a break from the fumes. I looked at his face and couldn’t help but laugh, but I apologized through the laughter.
It took months for the smell to finally dissipate. The girl I was seeing at the time wouldn’t ride in it, but who could blame her? I eventually sold it to an unsuspecting victim and bought a pickup truck…for the ground clearance.
Wow, that is indeed horrific. Hard to believe your car just... went over it.