June 21, 2017 | Categories: Mission Reports

Mission Reports: Idaho Springs

We love to share stories and posts from our members and volunteers. One of our valued and active volunteers, Mike Burnett posted this yesterday recapping his experiences on a double header recovery for us Monday.

“Ended up going on two recoveries up near Idaho Springs with Colorado 4×4 Rescue and Recovery.

The first was a Jeep that had gotten to the end of a trail and slid sideways on a hill, to a point where if they’d continued to try to self-recover, they would have certainly done damage to the vehicle. A group of four of us teamed to make the recovery. We ended up using winches on my truck and one of the others to literally slide the Jeep about 8′ sideways up the hill. It required several hours of work and re-rigging both winch lines multiple times due to all of the trees. We got them out without a scratch.

Then as I was headed thru Denver on the way home, we had another call back in the same area of a half-ton Chevy pickup that had its 4-wheel drive go out. So, since I was close, I turned around and headed to that one with a whole different team of rigs. It also required winching with two different vehicles and some re-rigging. Then once we had them turned around, I had to hook to them with a trap to pull them up a long, steep, loose hill because they didn’t have enough traction with just 2 wheel drive.

In all from the time I left home until the time I got back, it was a 16 hour day. It was a great group of guys to work with and I thoroughly enjoyed every damn minute of it. 🙂

side note Very thankful that I made the expensive decision to switch to synthetic winch rope… what we did with these recoveries would have been a massive pain in the ass if I was still running steel cable on my winch!”

Thanks for the great story Mike, we love to see the off-road community getting positive press!

Photos by Mike as well!