I once hiked six miles to see a single riveted shard of old fighter jet fuselage … any bit of wreckage gives me a bit of a thrill (sick, I know). While plane wrecks are rare enough to discourage getting carried away with this, car wreckage seems far more common along the Bay Area trails.

Here’s one from a few months back:

This dead Beetle is along the Saratoga Gap Trail near Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Here’s an old dead truck at Grant County Park:

These make me wonder: where have the rest of you seen discarded cars in the countryside?

Many of the parks have old mining and logging gear, but a car left in the woods seems to have a story all its own. California has such a car culture, you can’t help wondering why somebody would leave on to rust somewhere (rather than, say, take it to the junkyard and glean a few bucks from its scrap value).

So, please share your dead-car stories, if you have them.