I guess everybody knows how that sentence goes and, while it might not make sense yet, I hope it does by the end of the story.
Thursday around 1:00 p.m., we received a request for recovery from Brennan W.. Unfortunately, he entered his phone number wrong, and we could not find a way to check with him. In his request, he explained he was new to driving in the snow and that he was stuck over some ruts a few yards from a forest road.
Since we couldn’t verify any information, I tried to find the person on social media. There were three members with the same last name within our group, but none of them knew him.
We usually don’t engage volunteers unless we have a way to check first with the requester. But we had a solid GPS location, full name, and description to it felt right to try help this person even if he didn’t know we were coming.
We decided to submit the ticket to volunteers in the area. Two responded, the first one William T. was able to go but later or in the morning. A few minutes later, Allen Huskey offers to help. In the ticket, I specified we didn’t have contact with the requester. Allen jumped into action and kept in touch with us by text the entire time.
He arrived at the scene at around 6:30 p.m., after driving around 2 hours. He immediately was able to verify Brennan was, in fact, there, and he left, based on the tracks on the ground.
He sent us the photo you saw above. We thanked him and closed the ticket.
Now you are probably wondering about the reference to the tree? I guess, even when we respond to a recovery and arrive at an empty location, just like the tree falling down in the woods when nobody can hear it… the tree makes a noise, and we still make it there and make sure nobody would spend the night in the cold.
One more time, thanks to Allen for helping a fellow offroader. Also, thanks to Matt W. from our facebook group, who on his own was searching for this guy’s phone number all over social media in an attempt to help us.
Note: We are constantly improving our system. Today’s showed us how important is to gather complete and accurate information. So I’m currently working on a way to request a phone verification before accepting future tickets.