A driver in Colorado managed to capture the moment when a truck driver narrowly maneuvered his out-of-control semi onto a runaway truck ramp. And while the video is hard to follow for a few brief moments, and there’s no audio to go along with it, we can only imagine the relief that the witness—and of course, the trucker—enjoyed after the semi stuck this particular landing.
If you’ve ever driven in the mountains, you’ve probably passed countless runaway truck ramps without a second thought. If you were born someplace between Toledo and Denver and you’ve never ventured too far afield, just picture the gravel trap next to a high-speed corner on a race track. The principle is even the same: help a speeding vehicle slow down before it hits something. And like those gravel traps, runaway truck ramps exist predominantly as unremarkable expanses of loose stone, but occasionally, they’re home to some spectacular moments.
That takes us to Wolf Creek Pass, which is about 180 miles southwest of the aforementioned Colorado metropolis. On March 20, a trailing driver captured this semi truck’s final moments on approach to a runaway truck ramp on US-160 and shared the video with the Colorado Department of Transportation. CDOT did not share any details of the incident on its Facebook page, but it’s safe to say that the truck (two ahead of the camera vehicle; watch for the smoking tires) lost its stoppers and was struggling to maintain its downhill speed via exhaust braking alone.
“The west side of US 160 Wolf Creek Pass has two dangerous hairpin curves and a 7% downhill grade,” CDOT’s post warned. “If you over-brake it. You Won’t Make It.”
In this case, the driver did make it, but only just. We get to see the truck negotiate the twisties approaching the ramp before our view is briefly obscured—talk about suspense. Afterward, you can see how far up the ramp the truck managed to coast before digging in. We suspect the freezing temperatures made the ramp a little crunchier and less compliant than it would be in the summer months, but at the end of the day, it did its job.
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