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...