That sideways car seat caught my attention.
Here's the videos. They are horrible cell phone videos shot with a flip phone back in 2007. I appologise.
We don't get much practice with mud here. It mostly runs downhill to Kansas and leaves us with rocks.
And before anyone asks... at the end of the video, you cannot hear it, but when my buddy (The Instigator) yelled "Thanks for making it bigger!", I did, of course, reply "That's what she said."
The Jeep is an '89 YJ with a Holly EFI 383 Chevy, TH350, Atlas 4-speed TC, 9" of lift, full-width axles, D44 front, 12 bolt rear, 5:13 gears, Detroits, 40" bias-ply IROK rubber on steelies with Staun internal beadlocks, Poison Spyder cage & Stinger, MileMarker 12,000lb winch, etc etc etc. It was a little overbuilt for that particular trail...
This is the recovery. This was actually his second flop in that mudhole. The first, I pulled him back onto his wheels, but he insisted he was going to make it on his own. Because winching ain't wheeling. This time, we just drug him out.
This is his first flop. The Ian you hear mentioned by The Instigator is the baby.
That was a muddy spring. Further on, we found this bone stock Ram who had come in from the other direction. He had brilliantly decided to put a snow chain on the tire that was touching the mud. Of course, with open diffs, that didn't actually help... I pulled him out too.
We did convince the folks that, while I could pull them forward, they'd never make it through the rest of the trail in that truck, alone, and going back the way they came was the best option. Ultimately, I drove around him on that side slope (I was quite happy about my extra track width...) hooked a strap to his tow hitch and pulled him backwards.
Mrs. Dog took my Ram through that same hole, just to show the stocker that it could be done.