Saturday, November 25th, 2023, at 5:32 p.m. (PT), we received a request for an offroad recovery in Valley of the Moon, California. The requester, Michelle Depakakibo, submitted the following information: “Need to be pulled back. About to fall off the cliff / I’m with the vehicle“.
Interestingly, earlier the same day but at 9:00 a.m., we received another request for an offroad recovery in Valley of the Moon, California, submitted by Danah Lucasan, in the same exact location. Still, they canceled the request because a few minutes later, they were in contact with a local volunteer, and they got help coming shortly.
From the second request we received from Michelle, we right away confirmed the location and contact information.
The request was sent to local volunteers no more than 5 minutes after received. No more than 10 minutes later, we had volunteers chatting in our lobby and asking questions. We don’t have too many close-by volunteers in this area. We had to invite folks from 70 miles around the area.
From the volunteers contacted, Christopher Pachall took over the request. He traveled about an hour and a half to get to them. By 8:00 p.m., he arrived. The recovery/ies… was finished at pretty much midnight.
From the volunteer
He later sent us this note: “The first rig had slipped off front and rear. We secured the rig to two large boulders and proceeded to attempt pulling the rig back onto the trial. With my 16.5 winch tripled up with a block and tackle, I still could not get the right back onto the trail. At this time, the local tow truck company showed up with a Cat skid steer, so I left the first rig attached to the boulders and backed down the single-lane trail. The skid steer made its way up to the first rig while I was going to drive all the way around to attempt recovery of the second Land Rover. On the way down, I ran into the owner of the tow company and one of his employees. They asked if I could bring them up to the first rig, where their skid steer was recovering the first rig. By the time we arrived, the skid steer was able to pull the rig back onto the trail and had to back down the trail along with the skid steer. Recovery 1 was done.
The second rig was the Land Rover with a blown transmission. He was in a bad spot right before the gate keeper of Valley of the Moons trail. As you will see in the video, we didn’t have a lot of room to work with. What looked like solid granite was just a medium-sized rock; once the skid steer started to pull it to less than .01 of a second for the rig to flip (watch the time on the video) what happened was the rock slipped and pushed upwards while the back tire dropped into a hole. Rough night.“
Here is a short video we put together with the videos Christopher sent us.
Christopher, thanks for all the help and for all the information. Your help with this request for an offroad recovery in Valley of the Moon, California, is much appreciated.
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