The Landslide That Didn't Happen

Before the days of children my husband and I used to like to go on long drives at night.

We live in an area surrounded by hills, full of winding roads. A couple of years ago we were out on a drive after it had been raining for a couple of days. The news had reported quite a few landslides in the hills.

We were driving a winding road in the hills that we were familiar with and saw evidence of quite a few small landslides that had already been cleared from the road. As we got nearer to the end of the road it became extremely foggy, we could barely see past the end of the car. We were nervous, especially with the landslide risk, but there wasn't much space to turn back at this point. We proceeded and sure enough came across a fairly messy landslide that had narrowed the road considerably. We had to drive so close to the side of the road to cross it that had my husband stepped out of his door he would have fallen down a steep cliff.

After we made it across the landslide we came across signs further down the road the said the road was closed due to geological surveys. We passed the first sign, not wanting to risk driving over the landslide again, but further down the road was blocked with a large impassable sign. Carefully we turned back and stopped. I was so panicked at this point that we considered calling the police, to tell them about the landslide and get somebody to lead us out. However at this point a young man drove past us, and then returned a couple minutes later. My husband stopped him and he mentioned the signs about the geological surveys. We asked him if we could follow him back up the road, because 4 headlights are better than 2 in foggy conditions. We mentioned the landslide and he looked confused and said he hadn't noticed anything. This confused us too because it was impossible not to notice, it covered the entire road and we had not been stopped long enough for it to have been cleaned up, especially not at 1 am, and there was no other route to the road that would have passed the point it was at.

So we followed him back a couple miles until the fog cleared up and he sped off. Sure enough, not a single trace of the landslide was there. The road looked just the same as it had any other night we'd driven it. The landslide had been vividly real. The car had tilted toward the cliff as we had driven over it. We heard rocks hitting the bottom and front of the car. It was very frightening for us because it forced us to drive so close to the edge of the cliff, so late at night, in a car that was definitely not made for off-roading of any kind. We've told other people about this, but nobody else knows what to make of it either.