Total failure. Abject, absolute failure. “Look at the size of the failure on that guy” failure.
Here we are, at the scene of the crime.
That little juniper is almost precisely over the target stand. And you see that big crack in the foreground? That little juniper is also going to take a 40-foot ride one of these days. Possibly within my lifetime but I don’t want it to be at the end of my lifetime, so that little juniper is deep in the zone I like to call “the place I’ll never go.”
And that does complicate things a bit. I have to work quite a ways back from the edge; even farther back than my acrophobia would normally demand.
So I chose the closest stout juniper in line with that little one and tied off a nylon strap. Pulled out the cable on the come-along and fastened it to the strap.
Tied the far end of the rope to a rock and flung it over the edge.
Then I had to climb down into a nearby box canyon to fasten the rope to the target stand.
I end up doing this several times. Yay.
Okay: Here’s the problem…
…and here’s the hoped-for solution.
Put them together and climb back up the canyon wall…
And here we go.
What could possibly go wrong?
Things started going wrong more or less immediately.
There was a scary lot of tension on the rope but things just weren’t moving. It looked to me as though maybe one of my clever knots had hooked on a root of that little juniper, and the tension was just pressing it deeper into the wood. Only one way to find out how much tension was on the whole rope…
And that was to climb the hell back down the wall of the damned canyon.
Even down on the ground I couldn’t be sure. There was quite a lot of tension. The rope might not be hung up…
I tried prying up on the stand with a fencepost that hadn’t quite managed to wash away. Nothing: This sucker is heavy.
So I went back up, released the tension on the rope and repositioned it for one more honest try.
This time the rope wasn’t hanging up on anything. I just didn’t have enough leverage to budge the target stand.
From where I was standing as I worked the come-along, I could just barely see one corner of the target stand. And it never moved a bit. I could keep cranking till the rope broke and cut me in half, or I could admit defeat.
So I did that second thing. And now it’s officially baking day.
Sorry to hear about the results, but glad they weren’t any worse. Do you have any tools that would work better to dig out the stand? Or is that fence post all that’s available?
You did the right thing, more than once! Which is why you are still alive. So now you need to pause; pause both to plan and to wait for help. That’s not a 1-man job!
By the way, would a backhoe be available for a few minutes?
I wish. That’s how we got it there in the first place, but that was a long time ago.
I agree with Ben You did good by not pushing it. I did wonder though did you think to take the plates off before you started to try and raise the target stand?
Also is there any way you could get Gulchendiggensmoothin up and running to make short work of righting the stand and fixing your driveway up from the wash?
I left the plates on because they’re buried in the mud. But the chains were free enough that the stand should have been able to at least budge. I considered that I might want to remove them once the rope was beginning to lift their weight, but we never got that far.
Re: Gulchendiggensmoothen – yes, and also not right now. Gulchie could run when he was abandoned, and he can probably run now, but he’s criminally undependable. As an educated guess, there’s something intermittently wrong with the injector pump. Here’s one of those awful life lessons I learned the hard way: Every time somebody takes an undependable vehicle into a dry wash during Monsoon, Uncle Murphy laughs out loud.
Boy Scout Memory kicking in: Rope together three poles into a tripod over the frame and use the come-a-long to hoist the thing a little at a time. Stack boards or blocks underneath when you have to reset the hoist. Etc. I’ve lifted huge tree trunks and other things that way.
Could you get a hydraulic floor jack under any part of it to get it started?
I’ve got the Jeep’s bottle jack, but I’d have to dig a big hole in the mud to get it under the stand. And at that I’d only get it a foot or so off the ground.
Do any gulchies happen to have one (or more) of these? https://www.amazon.com/Hi-Lift-Jack-HL484-Black-Steel/dp/B00042KG3A
I realize monsoons this severe are a rarity, and that there’s probably a degree of emotional attachment to the target stand, but I wonder if it’s time to acknowledge Mother Nature wins this round and consign the target stand to becoming a cause of wonderment among future archeologists.
The steel plates may be the hardest to replace, and probably close to the hardest to extricate, save the entire stand assembly, but it may be time to salvage the salvageable and construct a replacement target stand. Perhaps something not disposable, but cheap and simple enough to be sacrificial in the event of a repeat event.
Oh, that’s a definite possibility, Norman. In fact the thought has already occurred to me that if I cut up the current stand properly it would yield material for a better one. It’s just a fuel tank stand, after all, and never was ideal. The simplest solution was to stand it back up, and so far that’s not proving possible. Doesn’t mean there won’t be a target stand there.
Ben, I can think of a couple of really good uses for one of those. Don’t happen to have one lying around, though.
Joel, the pictures of the water were quite impressive, but the force & extent of the flooding weren’t brought home to me until I saw the first picture. That’s a lot of area, swept smooth (more or less) in the way only a lot of water moving in a determined fashion will sweep.
It’s a little sobering to consider how much of that was green a week ago.
Just as a possible option from a lazy guy: Put as much tension on the rope as you dare, then walk away and check back tomorrow. Sometimes wet dirt needs time to let things go. Of course, the anchor point might let go first. Hard work usually pays off eventually, but laziness always pays off now.
For your bottle jack, the proper way to use it is to jack as far as you can, then block. Reset the jack and jack as far as you can, then block. Lather, rinse, repeat. Of course, after the second lift, it’s quite likely the stand will have sufficiently broken the surly bonds of earth to make your original plan work as intended.
Boy you don’t check the blog for a day and that’s when everything happens…
After looking at your conundrum I may have a solution but it may mean going on the scrounge. The items you will need to scrounge if you don’t have them are a long tow strap or tow cable or chain. Two one inch iron or steel pipes one inch and around ten feet long. Some wood or rocks to use as a rest when you have to reset the come-along. The come-along and the Jeep. The Jeep will serve as an anchor.
First take the come-along and hook it to the back of the Jeep. Hook the other end of the come-along to the tow strap/cable/chain and lay it out towards the target stand. Take the pipe and make an X with the intersection being around a foot from the top. Make a loop with the tow strap/cable/chain from over the intersection of the pipe to under then to over the pipe with the tow strap/cable/chain running towards the target stand. Then hook the tow strap/cable/chain the the top back of the target rack and stand the pipe at around 40 degrees facing towards the rack as close to the rack as you can.Then slowly winch the stand up. As the winch is applied the pipe should rise to the vertical. When the pipe is just past vertical stop get something to prop up the stand and reset the tow strap/cable/chain and the come-along then winch it up again.
You may only get a foot or to lift but that will be enough to let you put wood or rocks underneath to keep it from falling back while you reset and do it again. Another option is to forgo the come-along and use the Jeep in low gear to pull the stand up.
A word of caution about the rope. From the pics of the rope I would be surprised if it was good for anything beyond a thousand pounds and being nylon it will stretch so be careful.
If someone comes up with a better idea or if you think that this will not work please feel free to ignore my suggestion because it can go south and end badly. Good luck and be safe.
The post above is pretty much what |I was going to suggest, But possibly using the whole length of rope to get the leg from Jeep to a-frame as horizontal a possible.
That, And would it be an easier lift to tilt the thing up onto one end and then push it back over onto it’s feet from there? With the end standing on scrap wood it should be relatively easy (Says the guy sitting behind a keyboard!) to turn/walk a bit to reposition it.
The auto wrecker guys have a trick RE: uprighting overturned cars which are lying on their sides and need to be pulled back onto their wheels. The tow cable is tied off to the downside roof edge or center pillar (if there is one), and on the “up side” a 6 ft length of 4X4 or 6X6 is inserted vertically between the cable and the rocker panel. The 4X4/6X6 adds the additional leverage necessary to right the car.
This might enable you to get the leverage necessary to pull the stand back on its feet. I’d be really, really careful with a rope, OR a cable. Either will stretch some – rope greatly more than cable – but when they break they become high velocity whips that remove body parts (your’s, not the car’s, although I’ve seen entire an windshield removed instantaneously by a cable when a winch cable broke).
We used the trick of an old (very old) fireman’s turnout coat – they’re heavy, multi-layer insulated canvas – with the cable threaded through both sleeves. If the cable breaks the hope is any “whipping” will form loops that snag the cable in the coat and the coat offers enough weight and air resistance to slow the cable down to safe(er) velocity.