In highschool I packed my car full with friends and we headed out to one friend's (Ron, we'll call him) ranch, about a 100 mile drive through steep mountains on a windy gravel road. We were all adrenaline junkies on the x-country team, and into doing stupid stunts and driving recklessly. SO my friends are all cheering me on to drift around the corners of the road, which is nice and wide. It's all going great and we're having a blast while I spin the tires and fly around the turns, sometimes doing slides up to 40-50 mph. As this was my first time on that road, I had trusted Ron when he told me the road was great for drifting. So as the miles went by I was getting more and more daring, pulling drifts waay longer than I ever had before.

And then, wouldn't you know it, on a left turn in full drift, the shoulder on the right side dropped away suddenly and everyone was staring at an open abyss, a cliff straight down the canyon into a river many hundreds of feets below. All within about a second we had gone from the nice open and visible road onto a narrow, very windy, completely different beast. The car was on track to fly right off the edge, and we probably came to within a foot of having a tire off the road and in the air. Somehow in my immediate surprise I managed to keep the wheel turned just so that we swerved back to the left, though still moving much too quickly for the winding road we were now on. After swinging to the left side of the road I over-corrected back to the right, then back left again before we finally came to a sliding stop, still somehow on the road.

We were all sweating bullets, and when we got out of the car to look at the skid marks in the gravel it was confirmed that we were inches away from plummeting off that precipice to our inevitable deaths.

I'll be a bit more safe on the roads now, after that.