The Recovery

I don’t remember much immediately afterward. At some point we managed to climb out of the cab and hike back to the highway. From there we hitchhiked back to town to get Bruce’s car and then we drove to a wrecking service that specialized in off-road recovery.

The guy wanted $400 at first, then added a hundred bucks when I told him it was up Mineral Fork. I had only just paid $750 for the whole truck but I didn't have a lot of choices. I called my insurance agent and told them that I had lost my brakes and had rolled over an embankment. He said that my emergency road and towing service coverage would cover it if I was less than a half mile from a paved road. The tow truck driver pulled out is topographic map and determined that if we calculated the distance by the way the crow flies, we were right on. So off we went.

It was starting to get dark when we finally got back up there, got a hook on the Willys and began to winch him up the embankment. But the angle was such that instead of pulling the Willys up, the fancy recovery rig was sliding backward in the loose shale. The tow-truck diver had a brainstorm to run his cable way out and around a big fir tree. The plan was to yank me over sideways into the stream then snake me up and out 30-or-so feet upstream.

The solution worked like a charm and in no time the ‘ol Jeep was sitting back up on the road, with the Hurricane flat six purring away like nothing had happened. The only obvious damage was a busted tail light lense, though I later discovered that the rear driveline was badly bent (ultimately replaced by a cut-down Peterbilt driveline that's there today). The problem now was how to get back down the mountain. I have no brakes, not even an emergency brake (that was something else that was broken on the original). The tow truck diver hooked a 50-foot nylon tow cable from his front tow hook to my rear bumper and planned to be my brakes as we worked our way back down to the highway. We hadn’t gone 50 feet when he starts honkin’ his horn and wavin’ his arms. It turned out that my gears were so low that he simply couldn’t go as slow as I could. When he rode his brakes to keep tension on the tow line, he locked up his wheels and slid precariously toward the ravine. When we got stopped, he jumped out, unhooked me and says "You’re on your own, kid!" He tells me if I need to stop I should just turn off the key. Great! I’ve got to maneuver around four of the tightest, steepest switchbacks in the Wasatch Mountains, in the dark with no brakes! To be continued...

Mineral Fork

A few days later, Bruce Galloway, Ralph the Weimaraner and I took the Willys up Big Cottonwood Canyon with the ultimate target of Mineral Fork, a fantastic mining road that cut into the high Wasatch Mountains between Alta and Brighton ski resorts. Dad and I had been up there numerous times on motorcycles when I was a kid. The terminous was well above the tree line, and depending on your vehicle and snow conditions you could climb above 10,000 feet.

The trail starts out by cutting into a shale cliff with four very sharp and steep switch-backs climbing 500 feet nearly straight up off the highway. Each switch-back entailed multiple maneuvers to get around. Once I had negotiated those turns the trail followed the creek straight and steep back into the small canyon headed south for about a half mile through some beautiful aspen groves.


At the end of this first straight stretch is a series of small waterfalls as the little creek shoots down a steep granite slope. The trail takes a near 180 degree turn to the left at that point as it begins another switch back over and around the slope. This switchback is not nearly as tight as the initial turns and, in fact, the tracks made it appear I could make it in a single maneuver. Once into the turn however, I realized that the tracks were made by short-wheel-base CJs and my old truck didn’t have the turning radius to make it. No problem, I just straightened out the wheel, and drove straight into the embankment with the intention of reversing back around in a quick two point turn. At the apex of the turn we were nearly vertical, ready to shove it in reverse when things went seriously bad. In my attempt to make the turn in one motion, I had cranked the wheels as far as they would go. In doing so, I snapped a rotten old brake line. And that was all she wrote—no brakes! Instead of a nice controlled reverse turn, we shot straight back across the trail and flew over a nearly vertical 15 foot rock face onto the Willys' big old iron rear bumper in the middle the creek.


Time stopped as we balanced there for what seemed like an eternity. One alternative was to continue over backward. Another was to tip left over another 15-foot waterfall (you can actually see it as a little white streak on the satellite map). The third alternative was to settle gently back into the embankment we had just flown over. As the gods opted for the latter, time sped up again with no more than a couple of seconds passing. Bruce was laughing hysterically. Ralph was still in the bed but now he was standing on the inside of the tailgate. Gas was beginning to pour through the fire wall as the engine choked to a halt and we sat there like a couple of astronauts ready for take off.

The Fire Road

Like I said, I had been looking at this unbelievable stretch of road ever since I could remember. That is if you could even call it a road. It more likely started life as a dozer-carved fire break. I had always figured I was exagerating when I told people it was a 45% grade, but I just found it on Google maps and the topographic shows it climbs about 450 vertical feet in about 1,000 lineal feet. If my math is right, that's 45%--if not, it's still steep.

So Chuck and I decided to attempt it in my “new” Jeep. I figured that worse case we would just back down. It was unbelievable. The old Willys just chugged right up it like nothing—nice and slow, no spinning, "just like a Willys in 4-wheel drive" as the Grateful Dead put it. The view of the Salt Lake valley at sunset from that vantage was absolutely incredible. The ride back down was a little slippery and provided a good rush, but basically its was just a fun ride. I took Chuck home and interestingly, that was the last time I saw him--but that's another story.

I provide this as background for what happened next.

I Still Have My Old Truck

Back in the Spring of 1976 I bought my 1960 Willys Jeep pickup. It's been at the center of many fine adventures, though recently it’s pretty much been relegated to my garage, the occasional dump run, and providing inspiration to write and paint.

I first noticed it sitting out in the middle of a field south of Idaho Falls, Idaho, and tracked down (as it turned out) the owner's widow. She told me her husband had been out raking their 20 acre potato field two years prior by pulling an array of old bed springs behind the Jeep. When he got out to clear the springs at the edge of the field, his heart gave out. The widow agreed to sell it to me for $700, including an 8-foot Meyer snow plow. I paid her the cash, got the title and left it sitting there for another couple of months while I made arrangements to get it to Salt Lake City, where I was living at the time.

When I finally got back to it, the truck started right up and ran okay, though there were a number of things needing repair. The side windows had been shot out, for example, and the outside driver's side door handle was missing (I actually got a replacement for that on the return trip from Idaho to Salt Lake City when I spotted another old Willys abandoned outside an Ogden wrecking yard. I jumped out with my tool box and stripped as much stuff as I could before anyone noticed).

One major issue was a non-functional righthand locking hub, so I wouldn’t have 4-wheel drive until it was fixed. My good friend Jim Pissot had ordered brand new hubs for his Willys wagon and planned on giving me his old (but still good) Warn hubs. I was, though, champing at the bit to go 4-wheeling. As soon as the new hubs were on, another dear old friend, Dave Cochran and I took the Willys up into the foothills behind the Utah State Capital and romped around on some of the really steep stuff up there. It was very cool how the old guy was just unstoppable with that 488 gear set.

The next day I went out to see another friend, Chuck Thompson, another car guy. He immediately wanted to go 4-wheeling, so we drove out to my old neighborhood in the foothills south of the city. There was this fire road that cut straight up a ridgeback on the face of the mountain just north of the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon. I had stared at that seemingly vertical road all my life. I had tried to climb it several times on various motorcycles but was never able to—it was just too steep. My Triumph Cub just didn't have the horses and I couldn't keep the front end down on my Hodaka Super Rat. I went ass-over-tea-kettle more than a few times before giving up. ---->