Getting a 4WD pickup stuck

> ... cattle trailer ..

Good thing it wasn't a horse trailer, or Mrs Cow might wonder... 🙂

The last 2 x 4 truck I had (90 F150) got itself stuck on top of a very levelish grassy knoll in mid summer. It was wet then. Soil was pure clay. I did all the forward, reverse, forward, reverse until I was blue in the face.

Next I know I'm up to my wheel covers in mud and ain't going anywhere.

I called a wrecker and they tugged me out. :pissed:

My masterpiece was sinking a 1983 Volvo 240DL wagon into wet, heavy clay in March. I learned a lot from the guy with a monster truck that pulled me out. All to save a 15 minute hike out with the TS and tripod. This was back in the early 90s when I was just trying to survive.

Instrument setup up all day in the middle of a property we were shooting topo. At lunch time I walked along the dirt road thinking I could drive on this, no problem. The thing is there is a 1" crust on top of saturated clay below. You can drive on it once which pumps the water up and makes the crust collapse on the second trip. The recovery guy dragged that car 500' back to the gravel road. The irony is I probably could've gotten away with driving the rest of the way across the property to the street over there and a regular tow truck could've dragged me the last 20' or so.

I had to leave the car overnight in the rain wife harranguing me the whole time. What am I supposed to do? Fly over there in a helicopter. I finally yelled at her you are making it worse. It's not bad enough I sunk my car, I have to get constantly reminded what a dumb thing to do it was.

The second time I stuck one was in the first week of August and nearly 100 degrees. It hadn't rained in a long time. So how do you get stuck in conditions such as that. Well, it's easy. The goal was to drive around a small pond in a pasture with no drawdown pipe. When it got too full it would spill around the one end into a ditch. What I didn't know in advance was that the ditch was really two feet deeper than it looked because the bottom two feet was full of silt that had loosely accumulated over the decades. As soon as the front wheels hit that silt the front end dropped a foot or more immediately. As I tried to drive out backwards, it settled even deeper. The edge of the silted-in ditch was too steep for the real wheels alone to pull it back out. I could ALMOST make it but not quite. After walking nearly a half mile to the owner's house, he brought out his 1949 John Deere B tractor and a short chain. All it took was a little bit of a steady tug in addition to my roaring engine to rescue the truck.

our firm used to have a 4WD Jeep Cherokee, and there were only two times it ever failed to go where I wanted it to go. The first time I was trying to drive up a riprap slope to bypass a locked gate. Had the wheel-base been longer, I probably would have made it, but even with the 4WD, once all 4 tires were on the loose rocks, I couldn't get enough traction to pull myself up the slope. The second time, I was trying to take a shortcut through a former creek bottom on a highway job. The contractor had dumped a bunch of rocks to create a crossing for the large dump trucks, but when I tried to cross, I sunk the jeep up to the axles in mud. The jeep had a winch, but all the trees had been cleared for hundreds of feet. It was a Friday afternoon, and fortunately the only guy left on site was the one with the key to the dozer. Coincidentally, that's the same job where another guy sunk up to his waist in mud a few weeks later, and it required a track hoe to dig him out (if you should ever need to do this, dig a hole next to the person whose stuck).

The third time was crazier yet

No water. No mud. Just large limestone rocks piled in a ditch.

Made it across with the front end before a couple of the large rocks moved enough that the rear end was hung up high and dry with neither of the rear wheels doing more than barely touching the top of a couple of the rocks. You could grab one side of the bed and work it like a teeter totter. This was only a couple hundred feet off a busy paved road. I'm sure I provided amusement for numerous travelers that afternoon as they tried to figure out how I could possibly be stuck in an area with no mud.

About 20 years ago I had a job for a cement manufacturing plant that involved driving over a massive kiln dust pile that covered maybe 80 acres. I have no idea how deep the dust pile was at its deepest. Of course, the pile was not perfectly smooth so there were little ditches caused by surface runoff all over the place. Dry kiln dust is very solid. Saturated kiln dust resembles a meringue pie topping. A scoop shovel full of saturated kiln dust weighs little more than the weight of an empty scoop shovel. We must have dug with two shovels for at least an hour to no benefit. We finally walked over the top of the ridge to wave down a humongous front end loader with about forty feet of heavy cable and a hook about half the size of a rear wheel. The operator tried to comfort us by admitting he had provided similar rescue services quite a few times. All it took for us to get buried was one little wet spot about two feet wide by sixty feet long. Everything was solid like concrete except for that two-foot wide strip of meringue that dropped the frame to the ground in a half a second.

On a Friday in 1976 dead winter and the ground frozen, I drove across about 2mi of bottom land that is never a good place to go in most any weather unless there is a major drought.

We did out work and finished marking a division boundary and closed the traverse to complete the job despite the snow and sleet that turned into a wet snow with flakes about the size of dinner plates floating down around 3pm and saturating us.

By the time we got back to the truck the surface was thawed out and water was flowing and pooling everywhere.

I barely got the truck turned around and was spinning wheels and we were not even sinking. We just could not go anywhere. We were sitting in a bottom field without a tree anywhere on the way out.

We hiked out to the nearest house, called a friend and when returning to the office I was told to go back and get the truck.

Spent all night with a wrecker service burying a wheel and tire for an anchor to 300ft of cable and we got nowhere near the truck and all we accomplished was breaking the boom arm of the wrecker trying to get it back to a hard surface.

The boss was furious.

12hrs later it dropped from around 40°F to 20°F and falling.

My GF grumbled, yet, she went with me in my truck back out there about 4am Sunday and I hiked into the bottoms and drove the work truck out easily.

The look on the boss's face Monday morning was priceless.

B-)

After working a number of years for an asphalt baron, I can relate to the 'kiln dust' settling pond. Not for amateurs.

The 'soft spot' on top of a 50' capped solid waste cell was my "Waterloo". It might as well have been an eight wheel drive truck...it wasn't going anywhere but down. After we winched out my truck out the operator told me there was still a rubber tired backhoe somewhere down below in that cell. The insurance company was still balking over the claim....

4 wheeling is a fractal term than can mean a number of things, depending on the geography. My kin in the 'high' country near Nederland, CO love the rock climbing and they're good at it. Their annual trek to Moab, Utah isn't a success unless they lose at least one vehicle. On the other hand, not a one of the bunch has ever tried to keep the wheel speed needed to get out of a soupy gumbo bog. Mudding is an abstract term to them. Down here it's taught at the Vo-tech...

some people have a special talent

Yup, those people are special alright. And, they probably weren't even selected for special attention via special education classes when they were kids. Too many times that "special" talent is activated with alcohol and other mind-altering inducements like pretty young women who need to be impressed.

What can really be dangerous is the combination of wet soils with bone dry vegetation. A few years ago I received a call from the crew chief that they were in need of my big truck to pull out the Chevy Blazer 4WD they had managed to get stuck in a highway right-of-way nearly 30 miles away. I toss in a couple of 20-foot chains and a tow strap or two and head their way. Upon arrival they seem to be a bit more subdued than usual. We get hooked up, the crew chief fires up the Blazer and 10 seconds later it's back on solid terrain. No big deal.

Well, no big deal until I get to looking at where they had been stuck. There was a fair-sized black spot of burned grass directly under where they had been sitting. This was a seepy area that had snuck up on them as they were driving slowly looking for existing monuments. That seepy area had produced some mighty fine grasses with stems about four feet high. It was miserably hot that afternoon so they had been sitting in the stuck Blazer with it running and the AC running until they smelled burning grass. The exhaust system had overheated the dry, woody grass stems pressed firmly against it as the frame was only a couple inches above ground level. They had faced the challenging task of putting out a smoldering fire directly under their vehicle. There was no room to work without digging like crazy while trying to toss water from a nearby ditch onto the burning grass. Needless to say, they really were hoping I wouldn't notice how close they came to torching the vehicle.

Working for California State Parks...the first time I buried the "Queen Mary" which was a 1 ton GMC Savannah with Quigley 4WD conversion. The actual RMS Queen Mary is more nimble than that thing.

Driving up a very rough & steep 4WD road from Horseshoe Cove up to the ridge at Salt Point State Park in Sonoma County. The road was wet with clay lenses. Come to a flat then steep uphill with wet clay, can't make it. Forward motion stops. Instead of getting out and assessing I backed down to make another run at it. Unfortunately the road is on a right curve going forward so I backed right into a bog. We worked on it (no winch, we would've had it out in 10 minutes if we had a winch) for a couple of hours. Got it uphill about a foot using lath under the tires.

We had an unloaded pickup so we tried to pull it sideways back onto the road with that but it just pulled it back into the bog. So I send Neal to go get help. He brings a lifeguard up with 4WD pickup with winch but that didn't help because we needed to pull it uphill. Finally gave up and went tot the hotel for the night (remote area behind a locked gate). The van was blocking the road.

The next morning we brought the park maintenance staff out there with two heavy trucks. They put a snatch block on a tree above the van. They backed a 1.5 ton truck up to the winching truck and chained tow hitches together so they didn't just winch the truck uphill (that van is heavy). Then they were able to winch the van up out of the bog. Then we carefully backed it back down. It was fun for those guys recovering that van.

After scouting the road we found a worse spot above, very rutted, maybe get the pickup up there but not that van. We had used that road before. The rest of that week we had the park staff mule us up there in a bigger four wheeler.

4wd gets you stucker, and deeper.

We got a 1977 Jeep Grand Cherokee all wheel drive down a skidder trail. With red clay, and a bit of rain. All 4 wheels were suspended. As the water went down, it GLUED the frame to the ground, in the red clay.

Took 3 days to get it out. Nearly pulled some trees over, to get it too.

4wd is fine, if the tires are on the ground.

N

My mentor used to say: "Ya know what the difference between 2WD and 4WD is? About 100ft cable."

In other words you could drive about a 100ft further in to the muck prior to getting stuck. Shocking how often in the last 24 years he's been right.

Steve

Not something to brag about. Got a Clark 666 rubber tired log skidder buried. One side went down first and had the thing listing hard. Broke through the crust into some blue clay. Pulled the bull line to a big yellow pine some ways away and ended up pulling the machine deeper in the mud. Got out my hooks and climbed the tree and re-hooked the line about 50' up. Fired up the skidder and started pulling. Tree started bowing over and its roots started pulling up. Re-calced the confugalty. Decided more iron was necessary, Went and walked a Cat high-track D-5 in from another side about 2 miles away. Hooked up its bow line to the 666 and started pulling. Promptly buried the Cat.
2 days later got out of the muck with a 235 excavator and a bunch of cut poles laid out in a corduroy fashion.
Some days are just better than others.

US101 between Willits and Ukiah keeps failing every few years because of the blue goo. I've been watching Caltrans project after project over the past 6 years trying to fix it. Went over there with my boss and he said he worked on that in 1998 when he transferred to District 1 from San Diego.

Three years behind the wheel of a Humvee driving on three continents and I got stuck only twice. Both times were the result of following orders.

The first time was at Hohenfels Training Center in Germany. We were in an area where the M1A1's had been maneuvering and it looked like a moonscape with 10+ feet deep water filled craters. I had ten guys in the back and I was straddling the ridge between two craters, hanging left of center to keep from getting high centered but keeping two tires far enough right to keep gravity from dragging me into the crater. The guys were yelling and the Staff Sergent riding shotgun was freaking out, worried that I was going to roll it over. The Staff Sergent told me to go through the crater and I objected but he insisted, so I smiled, cut the wheel and stomped on the gas. Water flew sky high and I was slinging water and mud with all four tires but we stopped dead center at the bottom with water filling the floorboards. The frame was floating on the thick silt at the bottom and all the tires were dangling. It took a 13 ton tracked Armored Personnel Carrier to pull us out.

The second time was at Fort Stewart, GA (aka Camp Swampy). I had a 1st Lieutenant riding shotgun that I didn't normally work with and we were looking for a suitable place to queue up a company of vehicles near the wash rack. He had me take an access road through a sandy borrow pit with a high water table and about half way through he told me to turn a 180. I told him that the edges were soft, but he was in a hurry and certain that he new more than the man behind the wheel. A smile, a twist of the steering wheel, and one roaring engine engine later, we were sitting on the frame. I tried to dig it out but when I hit water before I got to the bottom of the tire I knew it was a done deal. The best part was watching the Lt strap on all his gear to walk to the nearest road to flag down a tow.

> 4wd gets you stucker, and deeper. [ . . . ]

Ain't that the truth! I've got a fat tire lifted and loaded 2d TJ Wrangler that's seen mostly desert rock crawling and deep sand, some snow. I armoured the undercarriage after some expensive drivetrain, oil sump and fuel tank damage; now it can be drug through a box of rocks riding on steel plates till the tires are back on the ground. I don't got a winch, help me buddy!

Oh the tales I could tell!

1970. BLM Dodge Power Wagon stuck in a bog in Northern Idaho 8 miles from the nearest FS road. It was OK in the morning why is it sunk in the afternoon? Had to hike out, return the next day, get close, sort of drain the damn bog, dig it out day 1, build a rolling corduroy road through the bog day 2 and finally winch it out day 3. Trailered in a Cushman Trackster which eased logistics. All on company time.;-)

1975. FS Bronco in NE Oregon off roading on a ridge in the Blues hot mid summer. Hit a silt pit in 4WD and spend an hour spinning tires and working shovels, putting brush under the rig. A nearby fire lookout reported our dust cloud as a fire and the next thing we knew a jumper plane was circling overhead. The boss was not happy.

1967. Privately, hunting, drove a station wagon 5 miles off the road south of Boise, ID into gumbo country on a frozen March day. After a sunny and warm hunt we returned to the vehicle to find it melted into gumbo until the doors wouldn't open. Hiking out was a gumbo hell and took 8 hours. Had to wait till early summer to go back, dig and jack it, then drive it out.

Early '60s? The oddest save. Central Idaho, trying to make the East Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon River ford near Yellowpine in a 1950 Jeep Willys Station Wagon, only Dad, the driver on board. The river and rolling rocks underneath took the Jeep downstream, Dad bailed. We couldn't keep up with it on shore, last we saw it disappeared upright around a bend. Came back the next weekend, hiked downstream, found it a mile later still upright stuck in some brush. Hacked out the brush, fired up the PTO winch and finally got back to a road after some major chainsawing of a pioneer road. 2 days effort. BTW, when you lose it in a river, turn off the engine as you exit the vehicle.

1972. Stupidest stuck. A tricked up Karmann Ghia with walnut tires at night in the dead of winter on I84 in a blinding snowstorm. Gave up and took the Meacham offramp, and at 5mph lost the road, drove over a buried fence into a pasture 2000 feet, noticed we weren't motating forward, stepped out of the car into chest deep snow with zero visibility. Luckily it was a hiking trip so after snowshoeing around for hours we found the Oregon Trail Store, told our sad tale, got some bunks, hitchhiked out the next day, alerted the pasture owner, and returned 3 months later to easily recover the car. I bet the locals still remember the story.

I have many more stuck stories, including rollovers where a truck was declared a total loss (rolling 2000 feet into a canyon, something to witness), engine fire caused by a tree limb widowmaker crushing the engine compartment, truck buried by rockfall (easily recovered, remove the rocks, replace the glass after some autobody work), busted axles or CV joints (common). But those don't count; if you can get unstuck in less than a few hours and back home it's a delay, not a stuck.

In the late 1980's at Fort Hood TX I had a scout platoon supposedly clearing a route for us. When I called him for a sitrep, the LT's reply was "I've got 6 humvees and 7 of them are stuck in the mud". He had conned some commo guy into bringing his rat rig in the bog with him. Took my Bradley to his location and spent the next 3 hours letting them hook winch cables to my vehicle. The LT won the broken barrel award for his efforts.