Today is Pete's Birthday

Today is Pete's birthday. He got extra bacon and lovin from the other campers at Sundance Lake.

 

Today was also a recovery adventure for neighboring campers. Their 2/wd Ford diesel pickup truck became stuck straddling the narrow gravel road while trying to back their popup trailer into the site. It was stuck real good. 

They walked down to ask if I knew much about camping. I do. But the question should have been, do I know much about vehicle recovery. I do! From watching hundreds of YouTube videos I learned a lot. 

First, the trailer was jacked up off of the hitch and rolled back into the site out of the way. Next, a series of techniques were applied to get the Ford loose from its slippery trap. I tried jacking it up and placing boards under the tires. It just spit them out. We tried digging around the front and rear wheels, but the tires had no grip. I tried wedging a short steel grill I found in the woods at my site as a recovery board. Several times. It was too short to dig in and was repeatedly spit out. 

More digging. More wheels spinning. I noticed the rear end of the Ford was fishtailing left and right quite easily every time a new technique was tried. A risky plan came to mind. I saw it on a recovery video. 

The plan. The lady keeps those tires spinning while the dude and me push on the rear drivers side of the bed. If all goes well, we will be able to push the rear end of that Ford a whole 90 degrees back onto solid pavement. 

It worked. Nobody got run over. Eventually the right rear tire caught some dry gravel and the Ford was able to line up on the road. Glad it worked. I didn't want to have to bring ol Betsy over to pull that heavy ass diesel around.