THE GREAT ESCAPE!! // Stranded in the mountains (P3/3) // EFRT S5 EP25

I think we just did one of the most insane mistakes I've ever made on a trail. That's amazing. What a relief, what a relief, what a relief. Welcome to another episode of the Epic Family Road Trip. In last week's episode of the Epic Family Road Trip, we continued along the snow-covered mountain trail attempting to get to the town of Elkford to refuel our vehicles. Okay, so we got stuck again. We're probably just gonna set up for the night up here and hope that it's frozen in the morning. Keep going back, no, keep going back. I surely look at overlanding in a whole other perspective after going through something like this if we can get out of this. All right. We're still in the woods. We are gonna use the fuel we have and keep plugging away today. Not the best situation, I'll tell you that, but we're making the best of it. When we got up, it was raining. We didn't know if this would help or hinder our progress, but we decided to remain positive. After an initial winch up a snowy hill, we begin to drive slowly at first, inch by inch, foot by foot, carefully packing down the snow under our tires as we went. It turns out the rain had changed the composition of the snow into packing snow rather than the slushy loose crystals we were struggling with the day before. As we plowed ahead, covering a lot of ground and crossing a couple of bridges, we begin to feel a sense of excitement knowing that if we could crawl along steadily at this pace without having to winch or shovel out, we could likely reach our destination before dark. Making excellent headway, we decided to open our GPS app to check our position. After checking and rechecking just to make sure, our hearts sank. In our excitement, we had neglected to keep a close eye on our GPS. We were heading completely in the wrong direction. One thing we have learned these past five years adventuring together as a family is that it's not the situation, but how you respond to it that makes the difference. In this case, the response was clear. There was nothing to do but to turn the vehicles around and go back. Being careful not to slide into the ditch, we squeezed Worsley back into the lead position and started heading back. That was fun. I think we just did one of the most insane mistakes I've ever made on a trail. We've been struggling for the, this is the third day now, pretty much 10 hours a day through these snow trails, and we finally thought we're coming to the end of this pass. Yeah, we're good. We're just following right behind. We finally thought we're at the end of this mountain pass, we're going to start decreasing our elevation, get some less snow, gravel roads hopefully, but we finally made it like a couple of kilometers without having to winch every, like we were literally winching for inches is what we've been saying for the past few days because we'd just be pulling, winching from tree to tree literally just to get a couple of feet. We've been doing that for kilometers now a day, and finally today we've been making it like at least 10k without having to pull out the winch really once, thankfully, and we took a wrong turn and the whole 10 kilometers that we've been driving has just ended up putting us further into the mountain pass. Yeah, and we're low on gas. I've got a quarter tank left and pretty sure they're just as bad. They've already used the Long Range America tank. We just used our back caddy. We had 10 gallons yesterday, so we only have a quarter left, however this goes. We had blazed a trail for the past few days and it was crystal clear that the trail back was now our escape route. We were running 8 psi on our tires so that we could ride on top of the snow, which was four feet deep in spots. We connected the two jeeps together with straps and a winch cable, which proved to be an excellent technique. If Vandy started slipping, all it needed was a little bump from Worsley and off we went. If Worsley got stuck, all we needed was a little back pull from Vandy and we were back on the trail. Look at that. There we go. Let's just get over it ourselves. All right, I'll be coming through right now like a glove. Driving in the hard pack tracks was easy going and within what seemed like a very short while, we were starting to see gravel patches again. That's amazing. We just made it through the last thing. When we first came here three days ago, we were just driving full speed, came to that last snow patch there and that's when we first were getting stuck and it was just literally an uphill battle from there. We didn't make it. That's pretty insane. It's weird putting in that much effort into something like, you know, just seriously pushing yourself to the limit at the end of the day for three days and then having to turn around and come back, but honestly I don't really care as long as we can drive less than three kilometers an hour on dirt. What a relief, what a relief, what a relief. They did well coming out. We still have a ways to go so I'm not counting the chickens before they hatch and we also have to climb over the avalanche, but this is all good, good progress we're making today. Hopefully we can make it to the ranger station and get some gas. That'll be the key. I'm idling so I'm barely using any so I'm just under half so. Mandy, she's thirsty. Mandy's a little more thirsty. Get this corner and then an avalanche. Gotta get over this to get out after days of shoveling. We're still going. Thank you. Thanks ma. We made it over with one now for Mandy. No dad, the back was open after lunch. I guess we're in a bit of a hurry there. Lunch wasn't done and we're driving away. Wow, these things came in handy for us out there. We must have done 50 pulls, do you think? Easy? Oh easy. And uh yeah, for three days we've been going through deep deep snow. What a, we're no longer rookies when it comes to using the winches and getting out of deep snow that's for sure. That was unbelievable, but all the equipment came in super handy. I don't know if we're missing anything in terms of uh, well we lost our max tracks, that's a real pain. They're back on the trail. We went by the same spot again and just dug forever and couldn't find them. So some, they're way down there. Somewhere we'll find them in the spring. I'm sure they'll be happy. We should have had our name on it, but we'll get four, we need four max tracks. That's the only thing really we were missing. I'd do four per vehicle probably. Just to be on the safe side. We have lots of these, they're extremely handy. Super thankful for these Warren winches. We have two Warren Xeon 10S winches and they did wonderfully for us. We used them a lot and uh, nothing but good things to say about them. We were told when you buy a new one to stretch out the cable. We've stretched out the cable. We might even have to replace them. We used them so many times in the last three days, but very very good machines. After packing up our recovery gear, we began the drive back to find a place to refuel. In the end, one could debate whether we should have turned back earlier or been more cautious and not gone into the snow at all, but from our perspective, we're glad we did. We learned so much about the mountains, our vehicles, equipment, and mostly about ourselves. We will always enjoy the memories of this adventure and the family bond that it forged while overcoming adversity together. All right, so we are very very happy and relieved. I mean we had a good time up there, but we had a few pretty kind of hairy moments where we didn't know exactly, you know, whether we'd make it out tonight or not, but we got out and didn't want to spend another night up there because we heard in those elevations they're expecting snow and that's all we needed on top of all the snow we had. But we're low on fuel in Vandy and actually so low that we we were going to try to make it out to a town with a gas station, but we were down to our last, well she's running on fumes, put it that way. So we've set up camp here by the Kootenai River, not too far from, probably a good 45 minutes to a gas station. So we, me and Carol in the morning, will head out there, buy a jerry can, fill it up, bring it out here, and pick up Vandy and then carry on our journey across Canada. On the back roads, and the snow roads, and the mountain roads, all the way home to our cabin in Ontario. Beautiful little village of Canals, BC. What a neat town, right on the river, full of gas. The auxiliary tank and the main tank, which feels great. It's got 25 litres of gas on the roof for the kids, for Vandy. And now we're driving back to this absolutely beautiful countryside, check it out. Precious fuel. Stay tuned for next week's episode of the Epic Family Road Trip as we jump on the Trans-Canada Highway and head east to our cabin on the lake. In the meantime, we'll see you down the road.