Going for broke, 3 posts in one day! ATV rescue mission.

Well, I can officially call this a bust for getting anything done today at work. I was going back through the pictures from our vacation and thought these would make a good post.

A couple years back I brought our ATV's to camp and one of them ended up getting run off a mountain by one of our friends. It is amazing if you happen to get off one of the trails how far down the mountain they can go. Luckily the guy riding it was able to bail off before the ATV went over the side and wasn't hurt. The ATV on the other hand ended up seriously injured and 2 years later still isn't really back to where it was before the mountainside excursion.

Fast forward to this year and a very similar situation. Some of the other people at camp had brought a couple ATV's up (they do each year) and were letting a friend ride one of the ATV's and he ended up running it off the trail and down the mountainside. Again, he was able to bail off before the ATV went down the side, and again the ATV was seriously injured.

Here is picture of where the ATV went over the side. Can you see it down there in the trees? Trust me, it is down there!


Well, being experienced ATV rescuers we came up with the perfect setup to get the ATV back up the mountain. It was WAY to steep to think we could push or pull it up by hand but we strung together a little over 300' of rope and used a little brain power to save on the man power.

We decided to use Mike's truck to pull using my trailblazer as an anchor point.


If it seems like my trailblazer is a little close to the edge to you, it felt like it to me as well. I was actually standing on the downhill side when we started to pull but moved over to the uphill side after the tires slipped a little toward the edge. Thankfully it stayed put and we didn't have a bigger rescue mission to deal with! That last picture might also help in getting an idea at how steep this spot really was, we actually had to repel down to the ATV using the rope.

Here's the ATV all hooked up and ready to go. We actually moved it about 20 feet to get it to this spot. It's initial resting place was a bit farther back in the trees standing on end up against a tree.

The plan is actually working!! Look, here it comes up out of the trees (it was actually down in the trees to the left in this picture, not the trees immediately behind it).

A little farther!

I had to quit taking pictures at this point as we had a near catastrophe when the rope came apart at a knot after it went through the pivot point of my trailer hitch. Thankfully it was when the ATV was on somewhat of a shelf on the rocks and the guys guiding it up were able to keep it from rolling back down the hill. Other than that little snafu, this worked very well, we ended up stretching one of the ropes out pretty good so we have marked it as unusable for any future lifting tasks.

Here's the ATV at the top. You might have thought some of the previous pictures were a little blurry and that's because they are because it was getting dark. It was pretty close to full on dark by the time we got it to the top.

The last bit ended up pulling pretty easy and we ended up pulling up faster than the owner could push up the steepest part of the mountain. He ended up having to use the rope to climb the last little bit up.

Another picture at the top. You can see that the ATV took some serious damage on it's trip down the mountain.


The amazing thing was that we were able to get the thing started and were able to actually ride it back down the mountain (at about 5 mph). There is a LOT of cosmetic damage and one of the front wheels needed to be replaced just to make it easier to to pull it back up the mountain but the only other real damage that was obvious was the rear axle was bent pretty bad. The rear tires wobbled back and forth about 3" but it made it back down about 2 miles from where it went off the edge. Of course there is a good chance that the frame might be bent, but it is still amazing to me that it could actually move under it's own power after something like that.

Okay, I think I'm done posting for today. That gets me caught up through vacation for the most part so now I've just got this last weekend's visit to the land to post. Who knows, that might take a week! ;-)