Alright, I said I'd type up more yesterday, but I got distracted by football. I'll try to make it short.
I ended up going up with a Cherokee XJ and a Wrangler. Starting off was just fine - beautiful scenery and a little extra water due to melt-off. We ended up tailing a 4Runner and another Wrangler. We got to an incline on the shady side, and there was a slick ice patch. (
map)
This picture is looking down at where we came up. On the right as driving and left in the image there are some bigger rocks/shelves that were completely hardened ice, and on the left as driving/right in the image, you see a nice little dropoff.
The 4 Runner came up the right side with a little speed and kinda "bounced" off the right, and slid straight left with some speed like it was going to go over. Luckily, the little snow mound caught it, but it was really close. As you can see, if it were a little farther down, there are a couple slick tracks that go right over with no snow to catch on.
After they got done freaking out (a couple occupants were reluctant to get back in according to the passenger in the Wrangler), we ended up backing up to let them get behind us to go back down.... what we should've also done. They said it was their first time offroading, so we infer it's just lack of experience -- we had seen this from much farther down the hill.
The guy in the Cherokee has lockers, so he was able to get up no problem on the second try using the line on the left. We also knew that the 4Runner almost got dumped because it went up on the right and got thrown left. The thought was that if we start left, we won't have momentum to get thrown. Probably true, but we still shouldn't have risked it. Neither of us without lockers could get by, so the next stupid decision was "let's just winch over it." We had the thought of maybe encountering more ice, but we were 5 miles out of 8, and turning back to the sunny side. "We could just winch over again if we have an issue" was stupid in hindsight, because this only worked because we had room to turn around and it was straight. If we had encountered something like this on a curve at higher elevation, we would have been pretty screwed. I'm pretty pissed at myself for not considering that ahead of time.
An old Toyota pickup (I think from before they called them Tacomas) also went full sideways in this same spot (after watching us have trouble) and damn near went over the edge. He was with a couple newer Tacomas that we later saw behind us without him, so I'm guessing he turned back as well.
We did get stuck one other time, but I was able to use my shovel/pick to clear enough ice and throw down enough snow and dirt to get out of it. For the rest of the trail, I kept pretty steady momentum for fear of stopping, and in the process beat the crap out of the suspension. I'm going to take it to get the alignment checked when I do the inspection this week.
But it doesn't end there... it turns out the forest road had some spots that were just as bad, and we had a couple other spots where our hearts were in our stomachs watching the Jeeps slide or sliding ourselves. And then of course when we got out to the paved road, it had a good few inches of snow pack and hadn't been treated. We were able to crawl down slowly though, and at least those roads are tilted toward the uphill side, so if we had lost traction and slipped we wouldn't have plunged off the edge.
Anyhow, like I said, huge lesson learned. Glad to have made it out okay, but adjusting some of my recovery gear inventory now and I am absolutely not doing any snow wheeling where there are cliffs/dropoffs.
