Thankful

Wes was in an accident a couple of days before Christmas. He was driving down the mountain from McGaffey, pulling a tractor behind him. He had gone up there to dig out one of our renters, who had called for help. By the time Wes got up there, the renter had gotten unstuck... but didn't call to let us know (grrr), so he pulled out a few other people and did some work on the road getting to the ranch house.



It was getting late so he and the employee he had with him loaded up and started off the mountain. They wanted to be off the mountain before the sun went down. It had started snowing pretty good so Wes had the truck geared as low as it would go creeping along around 5 miles per hour. Everything was good until the 2nd to last corner, where he hit a patch of snow-covered ice and the trailer started sliding.

Wes said he was going so slow that he had plenty of time to think and to react, even carrying on a conversation with the guy in the truck with him. He was pretty sure he could get the truck pulling the trailer again, instead of the trailer pushing the truck, if he was to speed up a bit, but he was nervous that if he got the momentum up he wouldn't be able to shut it down in time before the next corner, and the next corner was a drop off on both sides of the road. So Wes told Jason who was in the truck with him to hold on and he drove it into the side of a hill to keep the weight of the tractor and trailer from pushing them off of the cliff on the next corner.


Luckily, Wes steered as best he could into the mountain. The truck had a lot of damage, but the tractor was unharmed. They had to climb out of the back window slider to get out because the doors were pinned shut by the hill side and trailer. They got out and unhooked the tractor to help pull them out of the ditch the truck was in. While working on that icy road a big grader was going down the hill and lost control and hit the hillside right behind where they were. Wes said that another truck was going down that hill and missed hitting them by about a foot. Most of all, we're thankful Wes and the employee he had with him were both fine, with only minor scratches to show for it. We are just so glad that it wasn't worse. A different corner, and he would have been off a cliff!