Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives horror stories of getting your trailer into someplace you cannot get out of!

I'm always paranoid about getting off the highway or main road and finding there is no place to turn around or any way to easily get back to the main road.

I've had my boat 27' total with trailer in some tough spots trying to get to a launch or finding that the road along the way is parked both sides of the road with other cars and boat trailers. Getting to the launch area there are a dozen boats in line to be launched and no room for the boats coming out to get down the road. Now those waiting to launch must back out hundreds of yards with the boat trailer behind the vehicle!

Since this event took place I have been horribly paranoid getting stuck with the 28 foot camp trailer. Seems like if you have to get off the highway for some reason. any place you see a Walmart is usually a good spot. A semi truck can get there, and they usually have a big parking lot that can provide a turnaround.

I've also come to the conclusion that I want a Wireless back up camera now. I think I should be able to replace the center yellow driving light on the top of the trailer. That gets me 12VDC to the camera when my lights are on.

Suggestions welcome on these types of cameras, but I think this is a looming purchase for us!

I can't help with the camera but I can suggest some bright backup lights mounted on the front corners that will light up the entire side. They can be a great help when backing at night. LEDs pull very little juice and can usually be wired right into your backup lights on the truck.

Yep, thats a great idea, I have these same kind of lights mounted in the aftermarket rear bumper of my truck. Off roading at night going backwards is critical. The pathetic reverse lights are barley good enough for the driveway, much less a steep rocky cat track overgrown with brush!

My Dad had a young trucker try to shoot a U off the highway, between the pump island and his gas station one night in a Freightliner with a box trailer. Couldn't make the turn of course and knocked the corner off the building before getting hung up. When Dad showed up, who drove over 100k a year in a Freightliner for 6 years, the guy was sitting on the saddle tank crying because he didn't know what to do. When Dad gave him a talking to about knowing when and where he could put his truck the guy perked up and wanted him to drive it out of there. He got on the running board and talked him through it but it was a nightmare.

I got into a very, very tight spot at Glacier (Apgar maybe) when I first bought my trailer. They were side pullout sites surrounded by trees. I got into one that I couldn't really get out of. Trying to make the turn would have put a tree into the roof of the camper. I ended up putting it into 4 wheel drive and putting the truck partway into a ditch to get it out, clearing the trees on all sides by inches. No damage done except to my pride but I am a bit more cautions about were I am with the trailer. I am also quite a bit better at backing up and knowing where the trailer is and how it is going to move, so that helps. I have a camera on the truck, but a trailer mounted camera would make it easier/faster if I were alone. Diesel stops have generally not been a problem.

Funny,

What is cheaper a fine to chainsaw down a few branches or a small tree, or camper damage?
One of the best investments was my Buckstop bull bar front bumper with 2" receiver hitch. Amazing how things can be maneuvered differently when hooked up to the front of a truck where the turning wheels are closer to the trailer. You can also visually see so much better this way as well.

My Camp trailer has shiny aluminum diamond plate 4' up from the bottom on the front. I'm not so sure that's a benefit in the dark with the headlights on if your connected at the front receiver hitch. I think that diamond plate reflection would be blinding!

One of the most common scary things I have seen happen is algae covered or slippery boat launches that once the boat is off the trailer the poor guy starts sliding backward with water boiling up around his rear tires as panic sets in and he is sliding back further and further into the water with full motor RPM applied to the tires.

Once you get him to just stop spinning the tires, he stops sliding backward and can slowly drive out or get pulled out. Never cared much for 2 wheel drive vehicles as boat tow vehicles!

One of my guys pulled my long bed crew cab with a 20' trailer up a VERY narrow, winding road through the woods at a job. Had a really funny look when I asked him how the [bleep] he was going to get it out of there..... Ended up unhooking it and spinning it around with chains and an excavator then re hooking it up facing back down hill. Pain in the ass but could have been a lot worse if we didn't have equipment on site.

We bought our first trailer last year, a small Lance. It was a used 2014 model that had never been used. A spendy single old gal apparently, per the salesman, buys and sells often. We this one came well loaded and with a camera. I have used it a handful of times actually camping and just playing. It works extremely well though I doubt I will use it much here in Texas. It is a Voyager WAOM562. In fact, we are headed out tomorrow for 4 days.

Drove a camper trailer, hay wagons, horse trailers, boats, etc since I was a kid. Always tried to be careful and plan ahead. One that stands out is going fishing with a buddy who asked me to back his boat in while he sat in the boat. I was happy to do it, he was taking me fishing. We get to a little dirt road about a 1/4 of a mile away from the water line and he turns the truck/boat trailer around and gets out. I asked where the ramp is and he says about a 1/4 mile down this trail. Was tricky, but ok. To park had to drive back out the 1 lane trail...no where to turn around, single lane all the way. I gave him a hard time about it and he just laughed saying "The first time I came here I drove forward all the way down...then had to back out, turn around, back back in, and drive out..."

Last year I helped a guy get a 23' camper out of his back yard, through a gate into an alley. Even worse, there was a ditch on the far side of the alley. His father had parked it there the year before and I have no idea how he got it in. There was 8" of snow on the ground. We used my Bronco II for maneuverability. We had to chain it to move the trailer. I got the back end through the gate and turned it as sharp as I could. We unhooked and put a crazy wheel on the jack. We used a come-a-long on the trailer bumper to pull it as far back as we could without hitting the gate. The wheel was dragging in the snow so we used boards under it to keep it rolling. Then we pulled the tongue sideways until we could get a pickup close enough to hook up outside the gate. During all of that, we used a Handiman jack a half doz times to get the crazy wheel back on the boards.

That's a great story. Kinda what I was expecting to hear.

After this long gap between posts I thought I was the only one to have seen crazy trailer situations

Having pulled a 34 ft enclosed race car trailer for 18 years we also grew very methodical about not heading down blind alleys! However, that seemingly was forgotten when we bought our JD 650G dozer in 2011 and we had the dealer arrange transportation. The driver showed up at 7 pm on a very dark January evening (fortunately not raining). I met him down on the county road and said "follow me". I never looked at his rig as we had low boys with D6 Cats up our road. He laboriously followed me up our 1.3 mile driveway until we got to our hair pin pond. That pond is formed as the road goes across a fairly step creek. He got half way around that curve and then we both realized he would never make it, and there was no way he could back his way down our steep and curvy road.

What I had not realized was that his truck was an extra long wheelbase tractor with a very large sleeper. Compounding the problem he had a very long trailer with a very large and high load in front and our dozer at the rear. We spent a long time looking at it and finally determined that our only choice was to roll the dozer off the trailer and use the dozer to pull the end of the trailer to lessen the angle. It was great fun rolling the dozer off of a 4 ft high trailer, on skinny ramps, in the dark, having never driven this dozer or a pedal steer version of a dozer. My wife just laughed when the driver said that I must have a lot of experience as I drove the dozer off the trailer (it was more like a controlled crash).

In any case, we used the dozer and chain to move the trailer to get up to our place and had to do the same coming back down.

At 11 pm the driver hit the county road with cookies and a nice tip in hand. The next day I went down our driveway to get the dozer and saw at least three places on the driveway where the outside tire of his duals were actually hanging in space with the creek 150 feet below.

When we got our excavator I met the truck at the county road and drove the excavator up our road.

I worked at the Ohio State University livestock farm and hauled livestock in to campus for the better part of 3 years while attending college. Hauling a 20 foot gooseneck in to campus was more than a bit challenging. Got myself intoa number of truly tight spots. Taught me to really check out where I was going, before going there.

Years ago I worked for a large LTL carrier. One winter one of our drivers had dropped a 28' trailer at a warehouse for them to unload. The boss asked me to go get it the next day. We'd had some snow and it was melting then freezing. As I backed into the trailer, my drive wheels dropped over a ridge of ice just as the 5th wheel snapped shut. The ridge was only 2" high and 4" wide but I had to chain that cussed thing to move 4".
Getting stuck in a bad spot isn't like bending a trailer around trees and rocks, but it can sure get frustrating.

Pulled a camper down an an abandoned rail road track bed for close to 5 miles when I discovered a 20 ft drop ending the "road" ended up having to back the trailer almost two miles until I found a spot flat enough and wide enough to turn it around by sharp turning the trailer, unhooking turning the truck around and hooking back up facing the other direction.

My 4 door, long bed Dodge pickup is 23' long and has a huge turning radius. My camp trailer is also 23' long. I do a lot of looking and measuring before I pull it into anywhere.