What Goes Up Must Come Down

Pilots have an enlightening, pre-emptive approach to safety, summed up in a short phrase: it's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than the other way around. Andy Roberts' approach to driving in the mountains is very similar. You can never go too slow down a hill, he says. Other wisdom: don't use your brakes 'til you need them; and make sure they're working before you start the trip down.

His driving school, Mountain Training Institute (MTI) in Castlegar, B.C., reinforces that approach to mountain driving with all students, new and experienced alike. For the new ones, says Roberts, it's a matter of teaching them how to do it. "But with the experienced drivers, there's a bit of unlearning involved before we can start teaching the new approach."

For drivers inexperienced in serious mountain driving, the biggest risk is being caught unprepared, he notes, coming off the top of a hill you weren't expecting, or starting the descent too fast and in too high a gear. If my inexperience is any indication, his observations are right on the mark.

In my 20 years behind the wheel, I've probably made two dozen trips through the Rockies, and about the same number of trips to the U.S. west coast where I had to deal with grades like Donner and the Grapevine. I've run most of the biggies in the east like Fancy Gap in Virginia, and some of the grades around central and western Pennsylvania.

Pretty tame compared to what the Kootenays have to offer. Highway 3 from Hope to Castlegar is, to say the least, an interesting piece of road. Fun and challenging, but it can be a killer, as the piles of debris that lay at the bottom of some of the turns will attest. As Pat Peters, one of Roberts' instructors, says, "Some of the wreckage is just too far down to bother pulling back up again."

That's not to suggest the only grades worth worrying about are in B.C., nor is an understanding of mountain driving valid only for drivers who live or work there. The ones who don't see big hills often enough to develop the skills are the ones who'd profit the most from the training.

I had the pleasure recently of experiencing a little mountain driving training under the watchful eyes of MTI instructors Pat Peters and Mike Boultbee. We ran a loaded tandem back to Castlegar from Abbotsford, at night, following the closing of the Truxpo show. Night driving in the mountains adds a new dimension for the inexperienced driver in that you can't see what's ahead. Not knowing whether to give 'er steam, let 'er roll, or get on the binders is a real disadvantage if you don't know the road. At the end of the day, though, any Saskatchewan driver who runs out there for the first time won't know the road any better than I did, so the experience was valid, and worth sharing.

With your faithful scribe at the wheel, we'd made our way through Manning Provincial Park, pulled a few grades and slid down a few others when Boultbee asked how I knew which gear to use for a descent.

I recalled the Ontario Truck Drivers handbook, from 1978, suggesting - as it still does, I believe - that you should go down the hill in the same gear you'd use to climb it. Boultbee then asked how I'd know if I had never climbed the hill. Then Peters pointed to a ridge off in the distance, one side much steeper than the other, and said what if I'd come up the shallow side, and was about to go down the steep side? All my mountain driving training went out the window with that single gesture. But honestly, that question had puzzled me for years, though I never really thought about it. How was a driver to gauge the right gear for the descent? The Ontario truck driver's manual certainly wasn't much use to me at that point.

Confidence in the Equipment
Before you go anywhere near a hill, both instructors stress the importance of the pre-trip inspection, especially the brakes. For obvious reasons, you need to know you've got brakes before you start. A mark-and-measure inspection is essential unless you've got good, properly set stroke indicators under there. Peters stressed that under full application, the pushrod and the arm of the slack adjuster should be at 90 degrees to each other. Simply looking for the 90-degree angle isn't enough until you've first determined that they're at that angle under full application. That requires a trip under the truck, sorry to say.

From there, with a reasonable degree of confidence in the condition of the equipment, you can forget you've even got brakes, if you're managing your speed on the hill correctly.

The two MTI guys make that run between Castlegar and Vancouver on a regular basis under revenue loads, so they're pretty familiar with the terrain. Now, the trip is an efficiency challenge. Fuel economy is part of it, but Peters says he constantly monitors his brake usage too.

"I've made the trip several times with loaded B-trains without touching the brakes more than a few times," he says. And I believe him.

He knows what retarding power the engine can muster, and he makes use of it. "Using the engine brake costs me nothing," he notes. "Brakes are expensive. What's not to understand?"

The truck we drove was a 2005 Freightliner Columbia with a Mercedes MBE 4000 (450 hp at 1900 rpm, and 1550 lb ft torque at 1100 rpm), which I'll report on in our December issue. Listed in the Freightliner driver's manual was the rated output of the MBE's remarkable "turbo brake" - a surprising 600 braking hp at 2500 rpm. Or 550 bhp at 2300 for the squeamish who just can't take a big diesel up to that speed. Yet, there it was in the book.

The problem was, I hadn't read the manual before we left Abbotsford, and I wasn't doing a good job of reading the hills out there at night. I had used more brake by the time I got to Princeton than Peters or Boultbee use on the entire trip.

I confess, too, that I was less than confident in my rather rusty shifting skills to try a downshift on a steep grade, thinking that I'd need to get onto the brakes in a big way to decelerate enough to accommodate the lower gear, and if I missed synchronous, I'd be trying to stuff it back into a higher gear than I was in to begin with. Seemed riskier than just leaving it in gear and using the brakes.

By the time we got to Osoyoos, I'd gotten the knack of it again, and at my instructors' urging, was dropping gears on the downgrade as I needed to. But they were still working on proper gear selection.

"The brakes are there for emergencies," they told me. "Don't use them unless you have to."

And certainly with all that retarding power in reserve - I wasn't running the retarder much above 1800 rpm, or about 60% capacity - I could have easily let the engine run faster. We motored on through a gorgeous B.C. night, stars gleaming and the air crisp and cool, the joy of driving out there masking the subtle dangers that I should have been paying more attention to.

That point came home on the final 15 km before Castlegar. The road is fairly flat, and unless you're paying attention, you might not notice that you're running down a shallow 1% or 2% grade for most of the way. Nothing dramatic, but cruising along at a comfortable 80 clicks demanded more than a few brake applications to keep the speed in check.

A few miles east of the Paulson Bridge, Boultbee asked if I had noticed anything. I hadn't, except the velvet sky and carpet of stars.

"Notice how often you're on the brakes?" he asked.

No, I replied, not really.

"Well, we've been on a 2% grade for the past 10 clicks or so. The 3-km slope down into Castlegar runs about 7%, and there's a light at the bottom," says Boultbee. "But we'll be making a left turn before that."

The implication was that since I hadn't really noticed that we were on a grade, I had been heating up the brakes at a steady rate ever since we left the brake-check area a few miles back. Under different circumstances, the final few clicks into Castlegar might have been rather interesting.

But Boultbee had made his point. A discussion arose over how to determine you were on a grade if by chance you hadn't noticed. For me, it was dark and I was distracted. I really couldn't see the lay of the land. I clearly had noticed the revs climbing as we rolled along, but hadn't made the connection between gravity and increased engine speed. My instructor pointed out that regardless of what I could see, my powers of observation needed to be tuned right in to what I was doing in this part of the country.

The Brake Check Aside from an opportunity to cool your tires, B.C. provides brake-check areas as safe pull-outs for drivers to assure themselves that all systems are go before crawling down the hill. Mountain Training Institute instructors Mike Boultbee and Pat Peters use them to verify the brakes are still in the same condition they were during the pre-trip, where they verified the brake stroke at full application (90-100 psi) by visually checking for that 90-degree pushrod angle. They walk around and touch the wheels, hubs, and drums to ensure nothing is heating up. If anything is much beyond warm, something's wrong, they note. Naturally, all the tires get a thump, the lights are checked, and a quick visual inspection of the undercarriage is made, just to be sure. With the engine off, the trailer brakes are applied while they listen for air leaks. Air hoses are inspected to ensure they're properly connected. Wouldn't it be a drag if a service line somehow disconnected on the way down? A brake check only takes a moment, but generates a huge amount of piece of mind.

"Fog or darkness, it's the same thing," he said. "You can't let the truck get away from you."

And an even more subtle danger lay in wait for us in the wee hours of that Monday morning. Frost.

There's a serious risk of a lock-up on an icy road surface, particularly when you've been running on dry pavement and making stiff brake applications. "Make a hard application on this stuff," he said as we passed over a frosty patch, "and you'll be sideways before you know it."

Rossland Hill
Out with Roberts the following day, I took the right seat while he discovered the virtues of the MBE 4000's turbo brake. We drove around for an hour or so before he pulled into the brake check at Rossland, a few miles south and west of Castlegar as the crow flies, and home to a notorious hill. He did his walk-around and brake check, then invited me to have a go at the hill.

On the way down, he pointed out the two vacant lots at the edge of town where separate careening trucks had taken the houses off their foundations.

It's a 10-km hill with grades as steep as 11% over its length - 7% is average - with a deceptively scenic ride into town, a 90-degree right turn in the middle of town halfway down, and a nasty series of twists and turns waiting below that. Again, Roberts pointed out the site of a nasty wreck, where a driver who had been talking on the cell phone allegedly missed a downshift and failed to recover before he flipped the truck over the right bank. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and the right side of the cab was destroyed, while the left side remained virtually unscathed. The driver wound up somewhere on the right side of the cab.

I came down the hill at 40 kmh in third gear, engine at 2200-2400 rpm, turbo brake on full - mostly - with no brake applications, save the red light in downtown Rossland.

The merits of saving the brakes for emergencies became abundantly clear. Had the driver I just mentioned had some brake in reserve, recovery wouldn't have been a problem. Fact was, his brakes were hardly working at all, but he didn't know it. He had clearly not done a pre-trip or a brake check at the top of the hill. If he had, Roberts commented, he surely wouldn't have ventured down that hill with no way of stopping.

The lesson here is that even if the engine brake is working and up to the task, something could go wrong. That's what Peters was referring to when he talked about confidence in his equipment. He manages the descent in a manner that would allow him to bring the truck to a full stop with just the brakes if it became necessary. Do you have that kind of confidence in your equipment?

And for the record, how do you pick the right gear for a descent of a long hill? Roberts and his crew advise that any speed below the posted speed for trucks will do, under ideal conditions, provided: a) it's suitable for the terrain, and b) the engine brake can keep the truck at speed without a brake application. You can always toggle between high, medium, and low on the engine brake switch: you can't go down a hill too slowly.

And thus was my crash course (pardon the expression) in mountain driving. MTI offers a more comprehensive program for novice and experienced drivers at the school in Castlegar that includes some classroom time, simulator time, and road time in school equipment. For more information give Andy a call at 877-965-3748.

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