Let’s say you could plop a Land Rover Defender 90 or a Toyota FJ Cruiser atop Khafre’s Pyramid, some 450 feet above the dirty desert. Could you conceivably drive the thing to the bottom? Intact, I mean. I’ve recently been wondering because, not far from my home, a fellow piloted his sedan off the Skalkaho Pass’s gravel two-track and descended—neither intentionally nor at a temperate pace—600 feet to a rocky denouement. “When we got to him, the car was pancaked,” says Burleigh Curtis, the president of Ravalli County Search and Rescue. “A lot of ropes, carabiners, and rappelling were involved. When we winched ourselves down, the guy said, ‘Hey, glad to see you; what took so long?’ I was so shocked I began laughing—a lesson about assuming a guy is…
