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Vaughn McMillan

Vaughn McMillan

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A few nights ago I stumbled upon the YouTube channel for Matt's Off Road Recovery. Matt runs a towing service in Hurricane Utah, and although he has conventional winch trucks and roll-back wreckers, he specializes in recovery of off-road vehicles. Hurricane is is soutwest of Zion National park, and that part of Utah is a tourist destination for off-roading, since it offers sand dunes, rock climbing, mountain trails, and snow. His main weapon of choice if the Yellow Banana, a Jeep Cherokee that he puts into some pretty impassable places. What really sucked me into watching a bunch of his videos is the down-home personality of Matt and the people he's got working with him. He started out as just a guy shooting video on his iPhone to put on YouTube, and his channel grew quickly, so now he usually takes one or more camera people as well as other help. On really tough recoveries, they will even bring multiple vehicles. I've yet to see him flustered or mad, and all the language is family friendly. Check out a few of his videos to get to know Matt and the crew (including the dogs) and see what you think. They're seldom longer than 15 or 20 minutes, most of them have a couple of recoveries per video, and I just think they're a real hoot to watch.

This is a good one to start with. He recovers a broken down motorcycle from a place that I wouldn't think you could drive to, let alone towing a flatbed trailer behind.

 
Fun for sure,,, but really,, that big of a trailer to retrieve a short motorcycle... Reminds me of deer hunting with my dad in his WWII surplus jeep with a 1950 Mercury flathead he put in it... It was really more about where his jeep would go than deer hunting.... Great times.
 
Paul Douglass said:
Fun for sure,,, but really,, that big of a trailer to retrieve a short motorcycle... Reminds me of deer hunting with my dad in his WWII surplus jeep with a 1950 Mercury flathead he put in it... It was really more about where his jeep would go than deer hunting.... Great times.
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He mostly uses that trailer for hauling broken 4-wheelers out of sand dunes. It's about a small as he can fit a 4-wheeler on. Like he says in the video, he doesn't get a lot of calls for motorcycles. He also has a bigger trailer that he hauls the Yellow Banana on when the recovery is several hours away. And in the winter time, he can haul his Snow Cat on the bigger trailer as well.
 
I'm going to have to see what my dirt bike buddies have to say about this. They've had more wrecks in way out places than they've probably ever told me, and they do like to tell stories.
 
Been watching Matt and crew for a while.
Have you seen the Corvair wagon thing he is building? Holy mother of... :oops:

Check out Fab Rats too, his buddy Paul.
Cheers
 
Stuart Ablett said:
Been watching Matt and crew for a while.
Have you seen the Corvair wagon thing he is building? Holy mother of... :oops:

Check out Fab Rats too, his buddy Paul.
Cheers
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'm pretty up to date on the Corvair build, and Paul's Fab Rats channel is also a hoot. I liked when Paul's wife did her own oil change (kind of).

I'm not really much of a gear head, but I like Matt's minimalist and "make it work" approach to problems. Like this video, where he decided to change the brake pads on the Jeep on the side of the road while waiting for someone to deliver the forgotten truck keys. No allen wrench? No problem, we can just use this busted screwdriver and a receiver hitch for a hammer, lol.

 
Seeing this brought back some fond memories for me. I had a Jeep that would go just about anywhere myself.

Back in the early 70's I was crazy about surf fishing and fished all up and down the Outer Banks. I did it in a Jeep Cherokee Chief with a 460 cubic inch Ford V-8 with a four barrel as the power plant that I bought brand new in 1973. That thing had loads of power but the gas gauge was like a fan when it was in 4WD on the beach. Back in those days during the fall and early spring you had to buy gas from dollar machines as the service stations were not always open. I had to carry a big wad of $1's to feed that thirsty beast which had a 26 gallon tank. During a weekend of surf fishing I might have to fill the tank 2 or 3 times.

I got that Jeep all tricked out with 10" wide white rims, big wide sand tires. I had a CB radio hanging from the dash so I could monitor the fishing reports i.e. lies. If you listened to the other fishermen on the CB you would spend the whole day driving up and down the beach trying to find where they were biting. Then I built a redwood rod rack that I mounted to the roof rack to carry my surf sticks. Lastly I had a stainless steel rack with rod holders that mounted on the front bumper which carried my 120 quart cooler. I also had a couple of cases of Beanie Weenies that I ate while fishing. I warmed them up on the manifold. :D

That Jeep would go anywhere. It had QuadraTrac which was quite the innovation as you could lock the hubs without getting out of the car. It also had low and high range. In low range I could pull a 22 foot Robalo out of the water without putting my foot on the gas. But that thing sure sucked up the gas. It never met a gas station that it didn't like. I am sure those big wide tires didn't help.

Being from the south I had little or no experience driving in the snow. I could hardly wait for some snow so I could take my Jeep out. We were living in Chesapeake, Virginia at the time and we had a couple of big snows- 18 inches and 19 inches in the same month. I jumped in my Jeep and took off. Funny thing about snow in the south it turns to ice on the highways in short order and 4WD or not you don't have much traction on ice. And you have even less traction with those big wide sand tires. I learned that within the first mile. After spinning around all over the highway I managed to get that Jeep turned around and went home to be with my wife. I still can't drive in the snow. I don't even try.

In 1980 my son was born and we took him in the Jeep to visit my parents at Christmas. Driving back home to Virginia it started snowing and before long the road was slick. I turned that Jeep around like the chicken I am and went back to my parent's house. I didn't feel safe driving in the snow. Caught a lot of ribbing from people who couldn't believe I didn't like driving in the snow with a 4WD.

When we sold the Jeep it broke my heart but that thing was a gas hog and it also ate tires. I needed a truck so the Jeep had to go. I had it for almost 10 years so I was really attached to it.

Here is a picture of my Cherokee Chief fresh off the lot but before I got the wide rims, redwood rod rack and cooler racks.

Cherokee Chief.jpg
 
Cool story Mike.
I've never owned a 4wd, but we used to put tire chains on our 2wd trucks and go just about anywhere on dirt roads LOL

Cheers
 
With the exception of just a brief period when I lived in California, I've owned at least one 4x4 vehicle since 1984 when I got a little Bronco II. It was a pretty capable little truck and served me well when I was a construction inspector, including one summer on a project at a ski area. (I'd spend all day in low 4x4 on that site.)

A few years later, my wife (at the time) and I became partners in 44 10-acre gold mine claims on some BLM land in the mountains of NM. In order to keep the claims active, we had to do $200 per claim of maintenance every year. To do that, we and our partners would spend most weekends doing road maintenance, which involced driving on the primitive roads until we couldn't go anymore, and then filling in the ruts or clearing fallen trees so we could continue. Since I didn't want to beat up the Bronco II, I bought an '87 Jeep Wrangler. I kept it pretty much stock, but added taller profile tires to get a bit more ground clearance. One of the other partners bought a late '40s Willys Jeep with some type of Mercury marine engine. It was geared lower than my Jeep and could climb like a goat. It burned a fair amount of oil if it was going up or down hills, since marine engines are designed to operate on a fairly flat surface. My Jeep was also pretty capable in the snow since my tires were narrow. Whenever we'd have a heavy snow in Albuquerque, I liked to go out and rescue people who were stuck in the snow.

I eventually got a new job that required a lot of highway driving, so I traded in the Jeep for a '90 full-sized Bronco. (The Jeep would do 80 mph all day, but it was a ragtop and the wind noise at highway speeds was deafening.) Within a few weeks of buying the Bronco, I got it buried to the axles in some wet clay in a "dry" river bottom on a job site in Gallup, NM. Fortunately there was a D8 Cat bulldozer nearby, and after the operator stopped laughing at me he was able to pull it out pretty easily. That Bronco served me well until 2001, when I totaled it on a freeway in Pasadena CA.

These days I have my '97 Ranger 4x4 and a 2010 4Runner. I haven't really driven either of them hard off road. The Ranger has 240K miles on it so I generally don't take it very far from home, and the 4Runner is the Limited model, which is designed to be more of a luxury SUV than a true off road vehicle. What little offroading (basically remote Forest Service roads) I've done in the 4Runner has been done pretty gently, but it still has gotten through anything I've pointed it at so far. The Limited is the only 4Runner with AWD, so it's great in the snow. It also has high and low 4WD for the times I want to play around in the rugged stuff. If I had the time, money, and mechanical skills, I'd love to build a rock crawler like Matt's yellow XJ.
 
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