IDIOTS! And way too many of them!

 

You can't fix stupid. An axle, sure.. stupid.. nope

 

Hard to fly like an eagle when you soar with a turkey

 

If it is mud soup then obviously shoveling don't always work.

But there have been a few times in my life I have come across people sitting on the frame in a ditch in snow. I offered to help shovel some of it out from the frame and tires. If it is heavy packed snow, then the stuff is worse than mud.

You get "naw it will be fine, my rig can pull anything". Have stood back and watched them tear shit up.

It does not take a rocket surgeon to look at a stuck vehicle and size up when you need to do some preparation work prior to pulling. I have even got filthy jacking up vehicles to get something under the tires. But if your patient and willing to get dirty and sweaty, almost anything can get unstuck in one piece.

If those people had grown up around a farm, they would probably have known. Stuff does get stuck. Actually, if they had any common sense they would have known. Even the angle was idiotic.

I am amazed how lazy people get when it comes to just clearing a little mud or snow, or even thinking things through to make a pull safer.

When I run into groups like that in a situation now, I just leave. They won't listen anyway. In that video, it was the owners own fault he let his vehicle be destroyed.

 

That almost looked like a tidal slough of some sort. If you notice there are no fresh vehicle tracks behind him. Almost like it had sat there for hours with water going by. If it was a tidal slough then when the water recedes the mud/sand can be like concrete........that's how many people up here loose their lives as they get a leg stuck and can't get out. In this case a little shoveling would have helped immensely.

 

In this part of the world, besides very fine and powdery (like flour) loose sand, there are also areas in the desert with vast patches of thick mud laying below a thin dry crusty surface layer. That type of terrain is sometimes hard to read ahead, given that generally our kind of offroading is faster paced than rock crawling. When hitting such a patch, the crust breaks and the vehicles burrows itself to the frame in a very short distance (depending on your speed) . It is capable of stopping a vehicle traveling @ 60 mph in about 30 feet. (I remember once we couldn't even open the doors and got out from the windows) ... The only way out is digging, placing the sand mats and reversing .
I also remember one time a friend was wheeling his '97 Toyota Land Cruiser near an old oil drilling field about 4 hours away from the city. Oil rigs dump produced water and sludge in nearby pits the size of football fields. Unaware, he got his vehicle trapped to the frame in a cement like concoction of stinky mud and oil. He called us to the rescue - we reached there by 10 pm and got down and dirty. It was 4 am by the time we got him out ! - It was beyond exhausting.

Pics here are of examples of some of our terrain types.