What’s Wrong With This Picture?

By Jerry Smith

January 27, 2014

We all do it… put our Jeeps in jeopardy. Some of us do it more often than others of course, but we who do some serious Jeeping will find ourselves in that “situation” at some time.

When you find yourself in these situations, experience has shown time and time again that your best decision is to take a few minutes to “assess” the WHOLE SITUATION.

I found this photo on Pinterest and it really interested me.

Photo from Pinterest

(We’re going to make some assumptions here. We only have one view and can’t see everything one would want to before making too many judgments… but here goes with what we CAN see.)

In this photo, it’s pretty clear this Jeep is in a very bad position. How it got there is irrelevant at this point. It appears that the driver has had no chance to exit the vehicle to self-assess things from the outside. His first step looks like it would be about 10ft. straight down.

He is relying on his friends’ good judgment(s). In my opinion, that may have been his first mistake. After all, who has the most to lose here? The owner of the Jeep would be a good answer.

It’s clear that there has been some time between when the Jeep got into this predicament and when the photo was taken. Winch lines take a few minutes to be hooked-up and usually a few more for the winching vehicle to be positioned correctly.

From what we can see in this photo, there have been at least two really poor decisions made. Do you see them?

First, and here again, this is making some assumptions not clearly evident in the photo, it appears that if pulling this Jeep backward was the final decision, we could witness a serious roll-over.

If pulling backward, the right rear tire looks like it will come down slowly compared to what the left front will when it drops off the ledge. That puts the Jeep in a perfect position to roll.

Second, and forgive me if I am wrong, but it appears his friends hooked the winch line around the hitch ball. Doing this makes that ball a potential cannonball aimed directly at the winching vehicle. Do you call a “Foul ball”?

Take a minute and think about how you would extricate this Jeep. If it were your Jeep, what would YOU do?

After studying this picture about 3-seconds, my conclusion was they were about to make a bad situation a full-blown calamity. A much safer direction to be pulling this Jeep would be forward.

If possible, I would recommend having a winch pulling forward from the right front corner AND, if possible, have another winch pulling 90 degrees from the passenger side to keep the Jeep from rolling.

Doing it my way may require one or two more things for safety reasons. Do you know what they might be?

Here is a hint. Would you trust your Jeep to be pulled up this ledge by a vehicle only held in place by its own brakes? If given a choice, neither would I.

An even better situation would be to have the forward winching vehicle anchored to another vehicle so the red Jeep on the ledge will not pull it forward. The red Jeep will have a tendency to want to pull a winching vehicle hard toward it.

To make this even safer yet would be to anchor the side-pulling vehicle as well.

Believe it or not, there is one more safety trick in the bag. By doubling the front pulling winch line through a snatch block and back to the pulling Jeep, the pulling power of the winch would be doubled and the tension on the winch line would be cut in half. Does that sound like a good idea?

Seems like a lot from one silly photo, but then they say a picture is worth a thousand words. MS Word says this article is only 657 words to this point.

This photo just grabbed my interest and turned into something to do while nearly crying due to the Broncos losing the Super Bowl.

Some might say I obsess with Jeeping. O.K., suit me.

But when you come to a fork in the road, take it!

Happy Trails.

Happy Trails 4wd

Sunday, February 2, 2014