Picking stones out of my tires...

I can see it now. The state mental assylum. “We have to give her a tire a day. With a bunch of stones stuck in the tread. If we don’t. She freaks.”

 

And starts gnawing on the furniture! A MOST distasteful behavior!

 

I keep a small screw driver in my door specifically for rocks in my tread. Small things quickly become big things when your the one paying for it. Plus no one wants to hear the "Click Click" sound at speed. Only takes a minute.

 

I always pick out rocks in my pretrip for this reason: It forces you to concentrate on the tires. If you get used to seeing all that light colored material in the tread then you stop noticing the small screws and nuts and you’ll eventually drive them into the tire core and give yourself a flat. In the three years I’ve focused on this I’ve picked out about 10 tires that had large screws in them.

I take a screwdriver and use it as a leverage point, plucking out rocks with another smaller flat head screwdriver. Don’t get obsessed about getting all the rocks you only want to spend about five minutes of the pretrip on the tire treads. Focus on the outside channels of the tire, that’s where it’s important for water. Every day you do that makes progress. Don’t give in to the thought that it’s meaningless and that you’ll just pick up more rocks anyway. You take a shower every day knowing full well that you’re just going to get dirty again too.

 

It's hard. No right answers. What works for on road drivers is different than dirt. It's kinda like being a vampire stuck in Indiana or Tennessee. Just have to do what what you feel is right. Internal life is complicated. Picking stones not so much. It would be weird as F to be picking stones in Kentucky right now.