Hope everyone had a merry Xmas. I got waylaid by a bug so i spent the the last two days on my couch. Thankfully I was able to go snowshoeing when the storm hit three days ago and had a blast.
There were three rigs total up at Ellis trailhead, and one of them was a CRV. Couple of hours later as I was heading down, a second CRV was stuck at one of the switchbacks. It took me about two hours to recover that CRV. Funny thing is that the two of the occupants own 4runners respectively and they were in their parent's CRV!!
So, it turns out that using an Aspen tree as an anchoring point for a snatch block is a terrible idea because they just bend over as you load up the winch cable
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A second observation that I learned that day is that it's a good idea to carry various size shackles for recovering vehicles with dinky recovery points. Often times I've had to hook multiple shackles together to do a safe extraction. But, this freaking CRV had a sweet frame mounted front recovery point but my 3/8" dinky shackle bolt wouldn't fit through the hole. Man, that was so frustrating to say the least because that recovery would've taken minutes instead of hours. Now, I'm going to have to find a 1/4" shackle, I'm thinking.
Another thing I'm going to toss into my recovery box is a short length chain with hooks at the end. Those guard rails make for awesome anchoring points but they can slice through a tree strap in short order. Thankfully I used an old, beat-up tree strap so I didn't mind the sacrifice.
While we were working on the second CRV, the first CRV slowly drove on by
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