Oh man, I’ve got a good one.
A few years back I found a dirt-cheap Wrangler for $1,500 bucks, the only problem was the guy needed it off his property immediately.
“No big deal” I thought. I hooked the trailer up to my Gladiator and headed out.
It was smack in the middle of a three day sleet storm-turned-ice storm-turned snowstorm. The drive to get the Jeep was no issue, but actually getting the Jeep and loading it turned into a fiasco when we found that the Jeep didn’t want to start. So, about an hour behind schedule, the sun had gone down, and the sky started dumping snow. The hour-plus drive home was pretty uneventful, until in the last five miles from my house, a car accident forced me to make a choice: Sit and wait in the traffic jam, or drag the Jeep and trailer up over a steep gravel road.
It felt less like a choice and more like an opportunity to do something cool.
The road in question was a one lane gravel road that featured a wicked 250 foot rise in incline over exactly a quarter-mile.
Now, townships typically plow this road whenever they just have nothing else to do, so I knew it would be a snowy mess. Now, between the Jeep and the trailer it was sitting on, I was probably dragging about 5,000 lbs up this hill. However, there were a few tire tracks heading up the hill, so I had some false confidence that it wouldn’t be too bad. At the bottom of the hill, I dropped it into 4-low and engaged both lockers, rechecked all my chains holding my new shitbox to the trailer. Off I went.
I took off in 2nd, and skipped to 4th gear, trying to build as much momentum as possible before the steepest part of the hill. About 200 feet into the climb, I saw the tire tracks go from 2 sets of tracks to a converging mess. Someone had tried to go up, and turned around and came back down the hill, and it looked like the turn-around attempt was MESSY. Still, I was moving along at a good 15-20 mph and had plenty of grip.
Until I didn’t. As soon as I crossed over the mess of tire tracks, the tach needle jumped, I started hearing that god-awful sound of all 4 of my tires spinning, and then my gut dropped as I felt the loss in momentum. The speedometer dropped to zero, and I knew I was in deep shit. I mashed the brake, and the trailer started dragging me backwards.
Down a one lane, twisty, icy, road.
With a ditch on one side, and a 15 foot drop on the other.
In the dark.
I looked in my mirror as I started sliding back, to see nothing more than a 6×6 inch square of pitch black, except the reflection of my taillights in the headlights of the Jeep on the trailer. As I realized I was starting to pick up speed, I yanked the parking brake up, and got ready to bail. About a split second went by, and the ice spot gave way to gravel underneath. Somehow, the whole thing came to a stop. The trailer was sitting about a foot away from going over the hill.
After saying a few quick “Thank you” prayers, I walked up to the front of the truck and grabbed the winch. I spent the next hour trudging through snow, wrapping my line to trees, dragging myself up about 20 feet at a time, again and again, until I was to the top.
Definitely the most harrowing thing I’ve ever faced behind the wheel, and I learned my lesson.