karstic said:
This thread sucks w/o pics.
I think the camera was frozen
(actually Rabbit took some and he'll post them up later).
In any case, it all started this one beatiful Sunday morning when I woke up to a voicemail on my phone saying: Remi, this is Tim, I'm stuck in the mountains, I spent the night there I'm at 2n01 err 2n04 at 2n01 right at barton flats, HELP !
come up 2n01 to get me out.
So, I throw some stuff into my jeep (I'm still half awake) and I get on the road and I call Rabbit (I was supposed to be going to his place anyways to help him with a transmission swap) and he packs his jeep, and figures out where it is that we're supposed to be goign. So after I get to his place we go up 38 to mile marker 41 and notice this nice snowy road. We start down the road and at one point Rabbit goes: I'm not sure how far we'll get. Well since there were some tracks before us, I said that it doesn't look that bad and we should keep going and that I will ride off the tracks so that I will not be plowing as much with my pumpkin. It was all good till I decided to shift gears: the second I pushed the clutch in I stopped and I sank. Few moments later Rabbit sunk. When we got out on the snow it was about 4~5 deep and rather "soft" in quite a few spots. So Rabbit started working on turning himself around with the use of the winch and some plywood. In the meantime other people whoed up looking for other people that were stuck on other road (they had no recovery gear though). So we kept on working our way through the snow backwards (new plan was to call for reinforcements with more shovels and try going down 2n04). Now while Rabbit was working his way back up slowly towards me his clutch line blew out (talk about bad luck!) Luckily though he had his lucky rabbit's foot with him (actually he had two
) and he had a piece of hard brakeline that broke on me up at the Rubbicon. He sliced open his clutch line, slid the brake line in and clamped it down. In the meantime another guy with a tj and a winch showed up and told us about having to pay $150 for offroad recovery to some company. After a few minutes of talking, for good karma, he decided to help pull me backwards (we were no more then 400 feet of the pavement!) as long as he on't have to go too far of the pavement. So after connecting about 5 straps to his winch line, and moving back a foot at a time with a help of a wooden board, I got a few feet closer towards blacktop. In the meantime Tim shows up after pulling himself out in the morning. Once I got back out of the deep fluffy stuff into some harder stuff, I stopped and played "anchor" for Rabbit who pulled himself out. Then I backed the rest of the way out and off we were to a place in angelus for some beer and food.
Now couple things come to my mind after all this:
1. Make sure that you have some food and water in your jeep at all times: powerbars or something similar (Tim spent the whole night without food).
2. Carry extra clothing when you're out in weather that can go bad.
3. When you call for recovery: mention what you're stuck in
4. Dry socks are worth their weight tenfold in gold!
All in all it was a fun day though. I had a blast and it was certainly worht a laugh to see Tim show up and see us pulling ourselves out to go and try another way to get some rescue out to him.
