Saturday, June 3rd, 2023, at 1:36 a.m. (CDT), we received a request for help for an offroad recovery in Texas. Nathan Curtzinger was stuck in the mud in his truck. His request read: “Just right before the county road v intersection and 115 I’m in a two-wheel drive avalanche will need someone or multiple someone’s with 4×4 my truck is half in a ditch and half on the road leaning on the passenger side can’t provide photos due to it being dark and no lights / I’m with the vehicle“
This area in Texas has very few volunteers available, we had to expand to 100+ miles in order to find help. In fact, the volunteer who attended came all the way from New Mexico and drove over 2 hours, 100+ miles to help Nathan.
At around 4:30 a.m., Gregory Sullivan, the volunteer from NM, contacted us using the Lobby and stated he was 1.5 hours away but willing to assist. By 6:30 he already made contact with Natahn and started driving. He predicted to arrive around 10:00 a.m. During the night there were some other volunteers, who tried to help but they all got stuck trying to reach Nathan.
Gregory got us updated at 12:30 PM; he closed the ticket and told us Nathan was recovered.
Gregory sent us this note: “We left out of Clovis on Saturday morning and headed to Plainview to fuel up (grabbing extra fuel for Nathan), get some food and water for Nathan and his passengers (including a 4yo) as they had spent the night in the truck. We ultimately arrived at Nathan’s location around 12 p.m., CST. Blizzard Recovery is a group out of Lubbock and was on scene to recover a lifted Chevy Tahoe. The Tahoe was from that recovery group, and had its 4wd fail and slide into the ditch while trying to recover Nathan the night prior. Two other vehicles from the group were on site attempting to recover the tahoe and were blocking our route to Nathan. We backtracked to take a different route, aired down to 12 PSI and headed over to Nathan with one of the Blizzard Recovery vehicles in trail (a local farmer was showing up with a large tractor to recover the Tahoe). The mud was extremely clay-like and slick. Nathan’s truck had both passenger side tires in the ditch and was high centered on the crest of the ditch. We opted for a 2-1 pull using a snatch block with my 10k winch anchored by the Blizzard vehicle. The winch had no problem pulling the stuck Chevy parallel to the ditch, but we were having a hard time getting the vehicle up onto the road due to the severe slope of the ditch. The Blizzard guy suggested we static pull straight back with both vehicles using the winch. We executed that and popped Nathan up onto the road fairly easily with both vehicles. In hindsight, I should’ve broken down the winch setup and switched to a static tow strap that I had on hand to do a pull, but nothing broke and it worked this time around. We had Nathan follow us out to the highway where they went on their way and we aired up to head home. Overall I think the recovery portal worked really well as a means to dispatch us and keep comms during the events of the day“
Gregory, thank you, your efforts were very much appreciated.
