Dispatch from Southern Cruiser Crawl 2024:
Over 3 days, the team hit a bevy of trails from both sides of Hot Springs Off-Road park. Our trucks were running the trails flawlessly. But… We had a few moments of bad spotting (by yours truly) sucked up trail time like a hoover on Saturday afternoon. My IFS partial eyeballs have caused me to have some difficulty spotting Jake with his Land Cruiser. I thought it could flex over a jagged boulder at the end of Fun Run… And I was wrong. He got stuck with his front differential perched up on a nice-sized boulder.
Back-and-forth rocking was not getting the super-heavy Toyota anywhere. We figured out that rock stacking would not work without risking some damage to the differential as the truck bounced.
We pulled out all the bags of recovery gear and worked with RAGING TRD (3rd gen 4runner) to get in position to pull the cruiser back off the obstacle. Treehugger 1.0 had a winch but the lead rusted and broke off my XRC winch a few years ago and I never replaced it.
Gravity and the weight of the Land Cruiser were working against the winch. Jake’s built 80 nearly took the bumper off of Andrews’s 4Runner when we tasked the 9000lb winch. I watched the bumper start to drop while nothing was happening with the movement of the trucks. A weak link has been found. Andrew’s ARB bumper mounts are cracking.
This is not working, time to reboot and reset. Trail leader, Bart, hopped out of his buggy and had us reroute cables through a snatch block. You gain a mechanical advantage if you double down the lines with a pivot. It seems counter-intuitive and you never go that direction first when doing a recovery, but Bart’s fresh look at the situation paid off. A snatch block runs a lot slower, but you get more power.
Jake was unstuck! Perfect timing, we were all tired from a long day on the trails. The 4 of us rolled back to the pavilion with myself feeling the shame of getting the unstickable … Stuck. My bad. I have never guided or spotted a solid axle truck before… I think we need to work on this.
Bad day? Right?
Another misnomer about off-roading… Getting stuck or using recovery gear must be a terrible time. Shouldn’t we consider it the equivalent of a fumble in football or an error at second base? No, not to me anyway.
Grabbing the recovery kits and pulling a truck out from an obstacle in an off-road park is the best place to learn and relearn skills that you may need in the wild. Getting stuck in Hot Springs at an off-road park surrounded by 200 other Toyotas is ideal to say the least. You walk away with more knowledge and you see if your current recovery pack is the correct setup. If, heaven forbid you need to recover a truck in Colorado at 11,000 feet with no help, you have that additional kernel of knowledge of field training.
When was new to the hobby years ago, I probably made a bad judgment call. On one of my first trips to Colorado, we found an FJ Cruiser hanging off the trail road headed up to Poughkeepsie Gulch. We took a recovery strap and hooked to the front of the FJ… And then hooked the other end to the 2010 4Runner rear hitch. I gently pulled him back onto the trail and it all worked out. But to be honest, memories of this recovery give me the willies. Was I buckled in? How far down was the fall if the FJ had slid down? I know I had nowhere to go but down if he went over. WHY DID I DO THAT? I like to think that it was safer than I remember, or I would not have done it.
Years later, I caravaned with Bill Burkes on an overnight expedition to FJ Summit. Days were filled with a trek across Colorado’s Grand Mesa and at night we would round up the trucks at a campsite and listen to his stories. Bill is very well known in the off-road circles and he told a story about training for the Camel Trophy Truck team training. He described full days of recovering their trucks through bogs of mud with nothing but winches and straps. It was a great story, but anyone who has ever handled 50 feet of those straps in rain or mud knows what a terrible day that could be. One thing for certain, if I was stuck… I would trust Bill’s judgment! (Bart is a solid second choice if you find yourself in his presence)
I said to my son the other night “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”. He stared at me blankly like a 21-year-old son will do when they have no idea what Dad is talking about. The answer: “Practice!”. I think that applies here as well. Whether its the Camel Team or some guys spotting each other in an off-road park, an hour playing with your recovery gear will go a long way if the need arises in the wild.
