Reno and surrounding areas: Official spotted, BS, and meets thread

Can only get there from the south. Trail washed out under cartters truck. Otherwise north would be faster

 

Im going to try and get out there

 

Eta says about 45 min

 

Mission accomplished

 

THANK YOU.

will update later

 

Just got home. Will update with pics and story after we get all cleaned up

 

Glad you’re safe

 

Yeah, glad to hear.

 

Ok, Jeep's unloaded, got a shower and a cold beer. Here we go.

First off, huge thanks again to @excorcist for running out and throwing your winch on me. That gave us a lot more confidence getting out.

So the goal was to go over dogskin mountain from the South and end up on winnemucca ranch road. I started it in reverse last weekend, and since we were by ourselves going up this slot canyon, we decided not to press our luck, and turned around. Where we ended up stuck today was about 200 yards from where I turned around.

Cartter was in front of me since I had the winch and the recovery gear. This turned out to probably have saved one of, if not both of our vehicles and some bad hospital time, or death. Some of these pics you're going to see don't look that bad, but this was as sketchy of a position as I can remember being in in a long, long time.

Here's the scenario: We're driving down the mountain, slightly offcamber, on a trail that's just big enough for a taco or jeep. To our left is impenetrable brush and a mountain. To our right is a hundred foot dropoff. You know, Nevada.

Here's what ultimately fucked us (other than the road disappearing under Cartters truck) Right before where he got stuck, there was a few small trees/bushes pushing slightly into the trail. We both naturally tried to avoid them as much as we could, and then all of a sudden Cartter slams his breaks and his truck goes *whooooop* over on its front passenger side. The trail washed out underneath him as he was driving and disappeared down the ravine.


Now, that hole does not look that bad, and it sure doesn't look like there's a massive drop right where all those pretty bushes are, does it? It's straight down, and the trail is actively crumbling under his truck.



Well, luckily I prepared for such things. Did some fancy rigging, and pulled him right back out of the hole. That's where it started to suck.




When I got back to my jeep, it was was then determined that everything on the right that looked like nice stable trail, was also about to give way at any moment, and the edge was hidden by a little layer of bushes growing up around the side. My passenger tires were probably 6" from sending me over as well. We tried to reposition the jeep to get me back up and on stable ground, and it just kept inching closer and closer to the edge.

We ended up this far apart from each other, and there was no more room to maneuver.



Smart money said rig my winch to the driver's side somehow, and back up while I kept tension on it. That would have worked great if there was a tree that the winch wouldn't pull out of its roots.


We weren't getting anywhere with that


About an hour into this dilemma, a family in a brand new side by side the guy had just bought yesterday shows up. His concern (and I don't blame him) is that he was light enough that if my rig went over, it would drag him down with me. That's when I got a ride a couple miles up the hill where there was service and started looking for help. I sent out my feelers, and then walked down the mountain in the goddamn sun back to see what was up.

What we finally ended up deciding to do was put a bottle jack under my rear diff, lift the rear tires, and then pull me sideways inch by inch with the winch. After a couple hours of that, we had gotten my rear end over by about a foot. But that didn't solve the problem of my front tires, which now wanted to track directly into the soft stuff and push me off the edge.
Right about this time is when @excorcist showed up. We put his winch on my rear, I left my winch holding me to the hill on the left, and we put out all our traction boards, dirt, rocks, sticks, and anything else we could think of. I dropped my tires down to about 15 psi at this point.






Very, very carefully we backed my rig out and it held. Cartter's was easy after that since he was further to the left. We backed up the mountain, said "That sucked" and left. Took us almost exactly 5 hours to recover both the vehicles.

 

Our first choice would to have been to try and reinforce the trail and keep going forward. But even if we navigated that hole that cartter slipped in, not 20 yards down the road was another very off camber washout. Only choice we had was to go backwards.

Oh, and then. We've got my rig free, @excorcist is behind me, and I've got my winch on Cartter. A guy on a fucking dirt bike drives UP THE TRAIL, over my winch line, stalls out trying to get around me, and we have to push his dirtbike up out of the way. I've never wanted to push another human being into a ravine so bad in my life. Guy never said a word, just drove right through the middle of a recovery operation wherever he thought he could squeeze through.



And when I opened my Sprite, it exploded all over the inside of the jeep.


Other than that, pretty good day.

 

Glad everything worked turned out ok

 

I don't think there's anything we really could have done to prevent this. Maybe if I had stayed a little further back, we could have just winched him straight back and out. But the trail looked fine, and it was driving fine, right until it disappeared under cartter's truck.

I've made a mental note for the future where if you all of a sudden start to see a lot of green plants where there's not been green plants for miles, check your edges before you drive through

 

Pin is where the guy in the side by side dropped me off that had cell service. Circle is where we got stuck.
Star is where I turned around last Saturday.

We were so. goddamn. close

 

So basically that shitty tacoma bottle jack actually does a bit in a pinch, although that shit was tiring as hell when combined with digging out to the left of his tires to get the jeep pivoting



Content with my trucks capability tho. Does what I need for a daily driver. When the earth doesn’t make way underneath it

 

Then cartter says, "If only we had an impact gun to turn the jack handle"

And we did lol. Except I only put a 2AH battery on it. I figured if we needed it at all it would be just to spin lug nuts off to change a flat.

We tried to do it with the hi-lift at first, but my suspension is so droopy, we couldn't really get the tires off the ground

 

LOOKS Like he needed $20,500.....

Glad you're all ok.

Prescient...

 

I tried not to think about it too much on the way out, but with my shorter wheelbase and much farther suspension travel, had I been in front, there's a good chance I would have hit that washout and just gone straight over.

 

You need one of these...

 

I was watching you go through washes on the way out and some of those small drainage ruts looked much more aggressive with the way your hood poked up into the air or how tippy sideways you got, and then id just cruise through a bunch of em. Long wheelbase aint always awful I guess

 

I was back in 2wd at that point, so my front swaybar was locked back in. It's a lot smoother and less tippy with that swaybar disconnected.

I wanted to let you wheel the jeep for a bit today once we got over to moonrocks, but obviously that didn't happen lol