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St. Jude Donor '05-'06-'07-'08-'09, '14-'15-'16-'17-'18
It's not just the east coast.
Couple of summers ago, wife and I were driving the C6 down to SoCal on Interstate 5 through the Siskiyou mountains between Oregon and California at night. In one 30 mile stretch, we saw 3 bloodied, mangled deer still on the freeway having been killed recently by passing cars. Made for a nail-biting night of driving.
On Sunday, Mr.owc6 and I were out for a nice drive (I was driving) to see the colors and do a little wine tasting in western MD. Perfect weather for a top-down drive.
We were about 80 miles from home on a two-lane road in an area where the road narrowed with no shoulder and a guardrail on our side of the road. There was no real verge, and the woods came virtually up to guardrail.
Mr.owc6 started to yell something, and I looked over to the right just in time to see a deer leap over the guardrail, take out the passenger side mirror, hit the door, and do a summersault completely over the car narrowly missing my head!
Fortunately, he ducked and reflexively covered his face with his hands, because part of the mirror housing impaled itself in his right hand. I hate to think how bad this could have been if it had hit his face. Both of us and the entire inside of the car were covered in mirror shards.
I pulled over as soon as the road widened enough to do so. He had already pulled the piece out of his hand (big no-no, btw), so it was bleeding pretty profusely. Thank goodness, I keep MF cloths in the car. They're very absorbent. We wrapped up his hand, and found the nearest hospital on the nav, and turned the car around, picked up what was left of the mirror, which was several hundred feet from where the deer hit us, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the ER.
We were so lucky! If he had hit the front of the car, it could have been so much worse for both us and the car. Strange as this sounds, it's probably a good thing the top was down, because it would have broken the window and probably gotten drug a ways instead of a clean flip over the car.
After Mr.owc6 was discharged we had a chance to get a look at the damage. At first glance, it didn't look too bad. Obviously a new mirror was needed, and this is a testament to the paint on the composite panels, all that was showing was a line of cracked paint, and some scuffing on both the top of the door and the leather on the inside was scuffed up.
That is until we opened the door. That deer was moving pretty fast to directly hit the side of the door hard enough to break it.
As hard as that deer hit the side, the side impact airbag did not deploy.
Couple of summers ago, wife and I were driving the C6 down to SoCal on Interstate 5 through the Siskiyou mountains between Oregon and California at night. In one 30 mile stretch, we saw 3 bloodied, mangled deer still on the freeway having been killed recently by passing cars. Made for a nail-biting night of driving.
Glad you both came out OK from your experience.
I was driving 115mi back home from the Des Moines airport a couple weeks ago. Middle of the night due to flight delays. Didn't hit any deer, but the splatter marks on the interstate seemed endless. Must have been over 100. After my dad hitting a deer on the same stretch of road, it was rather stressful drive after being up for 20 hours.
No. This is the Rut - their breeding season. Buck are chasing does, attempting to breed. This pushes them out of their normal range and the number of deer/vehicle collisions goes up exponentially this time of year - every year.
