Most us have been stuck on the trail at least once. Maybe there was sand you didn’t expect, or a hill which you didn’t would be challenging. Most of the times it takes a little tug or a bit of winching to get unstuck. What if you were completely stuck right at the edge of falling down a 1,000-foot cliff, and any wrong movement could send your truck off the edge? That’s exactly the scene that Ric Swats came across with a few Jeepers two hours down a trail in Mohave County, Arizona. We caught his story on Facebook, and wanted to share it here.

The truck, a Ram Power Wagon, had fallen off a narrow mountain trail way up in the mountains and was barely straddling the edge. The truck was close to its tipping point, so if anything went wrong during the recovery, the result could be catastrophic. The recovery started with Jack, one of the Jeep owners, going up the side of the mountain to find something solid they could use as a snatch block mounting point. With nothing solid in sight, the team tried to jam their HiLift jacks into the rocks to provide an improvised mounting point, but the rocks ended up breaking.

There was no place they could mount a snatch block which made the whole operation much more complicated. The next idea was to winch the front and rear of the truck simultaneously to shimmy the truck back on to the trail. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either. In the end, the truck owners had to get in the truck and inch backward and forward while two jeeps tugged it back onto the trail.

The recovery took nearly four fours, with four Jeeps and quite a bit of manpower. Eventually, they scooted the truck back on the trail with almost no damage. This was a worst-case scenario recovery situation, but it worked out perfectly. Had the recovery gone wrong, it could have been a terrible day.