Watch and Wince as This Stuck Ram HD Is Rescued From a Skinny Mountaintop Trail

Not everybody who wanders off-road does so for recreational purposes. Sometimes, drivers get caught someplace they didn’t quite anticipate, with potentially disastrous consequences. The driver of this heavy-duty Dodge Ram pickup had himself a serious pucker moment atop Utah Hill, a peak in the Beaver Dam Mountains of Washington County, Utah, that sits nearly a mile high. Clearly, the state’s early English-speaking inhabitants had a good sense of irony.

As beautiful as the view may be, the peak of Utah Hill isn’t a great place to find yourself teetering. When Matt’s Off Road Recovery was called in to retrieve the stranded truck, they found it hung precariously from the side of a built-up trail just yards downhill of the cell phone tower that sits atop the peak. At first glance, the driver’s predicament doesn’t seem too dire, but the camera soon reveals that truck’s nose is well off the road and its wheels buried to the axles in still-shifting gravel.

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The problem with dangling from the top of a mountain is that there tends to be nothing around that you can use to pull yourself up. Down? Sideways? Sure. But up? That’s a different story. Racing against the sunset, the team develops a plan. While nature may not have offered a solution, humanity did. The cell phone tower’s robust foundation piers turned out to be crucial anchor points for the team’s recovery rigging.

The ensuing dance must be seen to be believed. He maneuvers the Morrvair—the custom Chevy Corvair recovery wagon featured prominently on his channel—delicately around the beached Mopar. While he directs the operation, one team member uses the Morrvair to pull against the weight of the big diesel truck as another eases it up the embankment in reverse.

Making matters more complicated, the heavy-duty Ram is equipped with a manual transmission. Off-roading with a stickshift can be trivial, but trying to reverse up a gravel-covered mountainside after you’re already up against the point of no return? Well, that’s why Matt and his crew are professionals.

This recovery didn’t require some of the cool specialty equipment we’ve seen elsewhere in Matt’s videos, but the team nonetheless made quick work of a potentially messy situation, getting the truck back on solid ground with the sun still lighting up the evening sky.

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