Blow Down Pass

The trip was awesome. On the way down, we learned the landslide from this other group who came there with their cars and a 5 ton budget truck. May be 30-40 retired people. The mud pit looked doable to me. I took two attempts on the right side of the road and I discovered the mud was pushing me into ditch. We tried to winch forward but my winch was failing against the big mud wall I was pushing. I backed up from that side one time by my own and the second time with winch. My third and best attempt was through the middle of the road. I made it as close as 15 ft to where I wanted to be. Instead of winching from that point (BIG MISTAKE), I decided to back up and take another run. I backed out without winch but then I realized my power steering was gone. And the engine was making a funny noise. So I stopped to discover that the belt was out but not broken. We tried to put it back. I uninstalled the belt tensioner to figure out how it would spring down. Of course we couldn’t discover how it did because it was supposed to be attached to where it was to spring down. Before we brake the belt tensioner trying to figure out, I decided to pull the belt up with ratchet strap to put the tensioner back. Well too much ratcheting broke the belt so I broke the belt, not the jeep 🙂 

So now that I knew I wasn’t going anywhere, we decided to get Paul and Maury out of there so they could bring me a new belt and the instructions on how to put the belt on. Well for some reason after all my fail attempts and braking the belt, I remembered that I had a snatch block in my jeep. (SECOND BIG MISTAKE). If you have a snatch block use it. It must be getting old not remembering stuff. So using the snatch block to pull Paul’s and Maury’s jeeps on the last 15 feet, definitely made winches much stronger to push all that mud. Maury left me his food 🙂 and they left me there with my tear full eyes as you saw in the pic 😆 

At around 9 PM the road guys came and worked until midnight and made the road driveable. The other group waited until morning 2kms away from me. In the morning, they weren’t sure if they should try to go over the road with their cars. Watching us trying all day yesterday must have given them confidence so they listened to my specific instructions and decided to go over the muddy road. Once they have seen the first vehicle go, they all decided to go. They all went through and I started thinking and contemplating when the help would arrive for me. It wasn’t very long. Probably 15 minutes later, I saw a black jk turned the corner. For some reason, I got out of my jeep and started waving the way one would to a rescue copter so that they could spot me 🙂