One of the greatest nightmares of driving through a snowstorm is the chance you might get stuck in a dangerous situation. Spinning out on a highway ramp exposes you to the chance of a crash, so you want to get out fast. One man armed with a Ford Bronco and recovery gear recently saved the day when he cleared out every car that got stuck on a highway ramp.
Videos have been circulating around the Internet showing an unknown hero saving the day for stranded motorists. It looked like something out of a movie or car commercial. Cars were trapped, unable to move on a snowy ramp. In the background, a Ford Bronco appears and does the unexpected by getting every single car out.
I was surprised when I watched these videos because hold on, I recognize the guy behind the wheel. It’s Tate Morgan, the guy famous for gracing the world with the Gambler 500 trail cleanup and cheap car rally!
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This story takes us to America’s Pacific Northwest, just outside of Portland, Oregon. On Valentine’s Day, a few inches of snow hit the Portland metro area. While that might not sound like much to our readers living in the tundra that is the Midwest right now, it had a big impact on the Portand area.
According to Oregon Live news, I-48 near Multnomah Falls had to close after about two dozen vehicles caused a pile-up in the snowy weather. This winter storm was serious enough for the Portland area that schools closed, parks closed, museums closed, flights were canceled, and even public transportation was snarled.
Those brave enough to hit the road faced snow and icing conditions, leading to a plethora of vehicles piling up on a particular highway off-ramp. In videos published online and shared by the Gambler 500’s official accounts, cars attempting to exit a highway slid off of the road and found themselves unable to make progress.
It looked pretty nasty out there:
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The video shows a highway assistance truck attempting to render aid to a driver, but everyone was stuck. That’s when the camera pans up and an unlikely hero appears. It’s a Ford Bronco, and its driver wasted no time in helping stuck drivers. That driver was none other than legendary off-roader and trail conservationist Tate Morgan. I reached out to Tate because what he did just isn’t something you see that often. I mean, how often have you seen a vehicle in trouble and everyone just drives by it without even attempting to help?
Tate went in there and saved every single driver.
Tate told me that this particular junction in his town is notorious for getting drivers stuck in snowstorms. He had the SUV and he had the gear, so he figured he’d help some stranded folks out and have a whole ton of fun doing it. From Tate:
[The Bronco is a] 2022 base Squatch manual with Milestar Patagonia M/Ts. I usually air down to 20 PSI but hadn’t the day of the recent on-ramp escapade. My daughter actually dailies the Bronco because it’s a lot safer than her car. What tools do I use? I’ve been a Warn person since I bought my first 4×4. They also own Factor 55 who makes the tool kit I was carrying that day. Also had a kinetic strap for when they’re really stuck, but I didn’t need it.
Pushed a semi up the same on-ramp last year. It’s a kind of notorious spot here in my town so it’s where I go fishing every time it snows. What was going through my head? I just really enjoy using the tools and skills. I have accumulated rescuing cars during the Gambler of 500. Or, maybe I started the Gambler 500 so I could rescue cars. I’m not sure.
All of this kit is extremely helpful when you’re off-roading and you need to pull a car out of a mud hole, but also works when you’re rescuing a bunch of cars. If you run a Gambler 500, freeing a stuck car is part of the fun, so the experience lends well to this situation, too.
Tate helped out by hooking up to stuck cars and using the Bronco to haul them out of the slush. If Tate couldn’t find a good recovery point, he broke out the old-school method of just digging in your boots and pushing cars out by hand.
This wasn’t Tate’s first rodeo, either. He’s saved cars from being stranded on this ramp in other snowstorms. The Bronco has proven to be quite a beast at this job, too. There’s a video out there featuring the semi rescue Tate talked about:
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The people Tate saved were immensely thankful. Tate also mentioned that people have tried to pay him. To that, Tate says:
Dude, I don’t want money, man. I do this for fun.
The truck rescue video above is heartwarming. Everyone from passengers in a bus to other truck drivers are giving him a thumbs up for clearing the ramp.
Rescuing these cars is just another example of Tate’s vision for using cars to do good. When Tate isn’t rescuing cars from getting stuck in the snow he’s really known for being the visionary behind the Gambler 500 and Sons Of Smokey.
I’ve written about the Gambler 500 several times before, but I think it’s worth revisiting what the rally is about. On the surface, the Gambler 500 seems to be about taking a $500 hooptie (more like $1,500 after adjusting for inflation), attacking it with a reciprocating saw and spray paint, and then attempting to drive your Mad Max-ian creation up to 500 miles off-road. This part alone brings a kind of joy to driving that you won’t get anywhere else. Gambler cars can be everything from an articulated transit bus to a Smart Fortwo. I’m not kidding about the bus. Check it out:
That’s crazy enough, but even more silly was the fact that the engine’s cooling system was routed through the hot tub in the rear.
In the Gambler 500 world, the worse your vehicle is at off-roading the cooler it is. While there are no actual rules on the price or type of vehicle, it’s not exactly the kind of event you bring a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser to, though you’d still be welcome if you did. Now, if you have a vintage Ural sidecar motorcycle? That’ll be pretty awesome.
But the real magic in the Gambler 500 is in the work it does to clean up the environment. The Gambler 500 brands itself as the world’s largest trail cleanup and it’s probably deserving of that distinction. Gambler events are spread all over the country from coast to coast and all of them have one real goal. It’s not a race, but pretty much a competition to clean up as much trash as possible. Gambler 500 participants will pull anything out of our nation’s beautiful landscapes. I’ve seen and helped Gamblers yank boats out of forests, remove wrecked cars, and pick up so much discarded material.
It’s common for a regional Gambler 500 event to conclude with over two 40-foot trash bins filled to the brim with all kinds of junk. Each year, there’s also a main Gambler 500 event out in Oregon where Tate is. That one event can result in literal tons of trash getting removed from the state’s lands. Gambler 500 participants aren’t paid for this, but they do it because it’s fun.
The Gambler 500’s roots were in Tate and his friends having little get-togethers with cheap cars in the forest. It has now grown into an international phenomenon. Today, the Gambler 500 is part of Tate’s Sons Of Smokey organization, a movement intended to bring the Gambler 500 mentality of cleaning up the world to as many places as it can.
Really, there are only two rules to the Gambler 500. The number one rule is “Don’t Be A Dick.” That rule applies to both our planet and other people. Remember, it takes no effort to be nice. The other rule is “Always Be Gambling,” and it’s a sort of catch-all term that suggests you should apply the Gambler mentality to all of your life. Maybe that means being like me and living a full-throttle life. Or, you could be like Tate here and save people stuck in a snowstorm.
As Tate has shown here, not all heroes wear capes. Some are wearing winter coats, driving Ford Broncos, and are just having a ton of fun while doing good at the same time.
As always, I would recommend equipping your vehicle with snow or winter-rated tires to reduce your chances of getting stuck in the first place. A good set of tires can save your life. They’re also legally required in some jurisdictions. Plus, as we’ve just seen here, really good tires can also turn your everyday SUV into a beast. But if you’re near Portland and find yourself stuck on a highway anyway, maybe a white Bronco will gallop in to save your day.
Top graphic images: thegambler500/Instagram; Superman III/Warner Bros, still via YouTube
I am of two minds about this. On one hand I would have probably pulled these people out too, under these exact conditions. On the other hand, I generally leave road and especially highway recoveries to the experts who have the proper lights, signs and cones (and insurance). Too many people not looking at what is going on with roads.
I use to go do this kind of snow storm recovery with my jeep and a tow strap and was told to stop to avoid being sued. Now if I happen to be right there and do it i get a verbal ok around the potential for damage.
This is the antidote to all the jackass people tearing up trails, leaving party trash and blasting music at campsites. The ambassador the off-road community needs. good man.
As an aside, I have used my traction boards for myself maybe 3 times, but I always toss them in the car when it snows and they sure come in handy for stuff like this. I’ve definitely used them on other people’s cars about 3x as much as my own. Easier and safer than towing, though I respect in this situation towing was really the only option.
Back in college, I used to go out after every bad storm in my WRX wagon on blizzaks and tow people out with my little strap. There is an immense joy that comes with towing out a big 4×4 on mud-terrain hockey pucks with a rowdy little wagon.
I bet more than a few of them were pretty impressed by the WRX. Subaru ambassador lol.
That car was such a little beast. I liked it more than the STi it replaced, to be honest. It was just such a useful little car in so many ways, and it was a blast to drive with the mods I had done to it. I still keep up with the guy I sold it to, and it’s still on the road today with over 200,000 miles on it now!
Hat tip to you, my good sir. It takes a certain degree of refinement, being the guy rocking a wagon in the heavily sedan-leaning WRX crowd. Not to mention putting it to good use. Well done 🙂 I’m the guy who’s always up for putting my 34hp engine to good use by giving a jumpstart to anyone who needs it. I made friends with some neighbours over the years after leaving them a post-in on the window with my number and offering to help if the lights they left on depleted their battery.
I’ve always been a bug wagon fan! I sure wish they still offered the current WRX in wagon (or hatch) form. I would own one if they did. I just can’t get over the looks of the sedan with the awful cladding. Oh well, I’ll probably just buy another old WRX wagon in the future to get my fix.
Cheers for being so helpful with giving jumpstarts to your neighbors!
Here’s the thing: there’s no new models, but you can always go with older WRX wagons, to try them in different flavours 🙂 There’s some goodness out there right now, depending on how deep your pockets are (for some pockets there’s always goodness out there, for others there never seems to be).
A GF WRX wagon like the one you liked is on my short list of cars I will own in the next decade. They’re gorgeous!
They’re absolutely stunning. One of my go-to choices for cheap used cars in various editions of Grand Turismo, it was always extra fun to win races in a station wagon! That one on BaT is to die for.
They were one of my favorites in GT as well! I’ve been causally looking for a JDM import of a forbidden fruit 90’s turbo Subaru quite a bit lately. As much as I love those GC/GF chassis cars, I also really want a turbo SF5 first-gen Forester!
Yeah, the first gen Forester looks great. I’l be honest, I didn’t know this performance trim existed. I prefer the rugged looks of regular ones, I’m a sucker for contrasting/unpainted bumpers in general, but I did see pics of a slammed, STi-blue Forester SF5 that looked cool as hell!
Yeah, the turbo models of the SF were only sold in Europe and Japan, sadly. However, they are all eligible for import now into the US!
If you like the two-tone rugged look, you would love my old lifted 5-speed 99 Forester! https://i.imgur.com/gP3XpL2.jpg
I am actually in Europe, but my domestic market (Portugal) is very small and too peripheral, so many brands offer a limited choice of trims/models here; it definitely doesn’t make sense for Subaru to offer the full Forester range when they know they’ll only sell the cheaper models. You’d think we’d get roughly the same offerings as the Spanish market, for instance, but that has never been the case – far from it. Portugal and Spain are so distant in terms of cars that we didn’t even get high volume Seat imports until the early 90s.
PS: your old Forester rocks! Hope it’s still out there going strong!
“These days a hero is defined as: ‘any man doing his job'” –John Mulaney (paraphrased)
Hero in 1940’s: someone who shot down several enemy aircraft, alone
Hero in 2020’s: someone who takes 5 minutes to help a random stranger
Pileup on the off-ramp? This sounds like a job for Necessi Tate!
I kinda did the same thing to a little Mitsubishi that got stuck in maybe 4 inches of snow with our CR-V. but most of it was just down hill. It (the Mitsu) got stuck a couple of times.But a gentle shove was all it needed until we got down to a plowed street.
“first rodeo” “Bronco”
Whether this intentional or not…
it’s so hilarious!
Don’t get me wrong, this is nice. That being said I wouldn’t trust those screw in recovery points on most cars nowadays, just seems like a way to have the screw in recovery point sling-shotted into the back of your head with a recovery rope.
To be frank, if you’re on the roads themselves and they’re plowed a reasonable amount you shouldn’t be getting stuck unless they’re pure ice. If you are stuck it’s most likely because you got shit all season tires on or you’re driving the wrong car for the conditions.
I went down a rabbit hole of winter dash cam footage of crashes, the overwhelming majority of the people who crashed had all season tires.
For very few cars are there no winter tire options, and if the car is sold in the US new there are even less cars that have no winter tire options, the only one I can think of without winter tire options are some trims of the Mitsubishi Mirage.
IMHO if you cannot afford quality tires you cannot afford a car. Bad tires will cost you your car and only your car IF you are lucky, if not you very well may hurt yourself and or other people on the road, if not outright kill them and or yourself and or your passengers.
If someone goes off of the side of the road in the snow, I’ll help them get on the road if the car is drivable, but I’m not helping them down the road. If the car isn’t drivable I’ll give them a ride home or at minimum to the nearest quality hotel.
But no offense those people who got stuck in that paltry amount of snow need either better tires, a better car, or both, especially since this guy towed them out with all terrains.
I think the risk is relatively low in this case. They’re stuck because they have too little friction, not too much. Pulling someone out of mud with a kinetic yank? Pretty risky. A little extra traction nudge on ice and snow? Unlikely to be enough force to be any real risk unless you try to unstick someone who’s high-centered on an ice berm or something.
It’s more of a point of principle. Kinda like flying a plane with a wing structurally supported by thin cables under tension, the term stringbag does not inspire confidence, neither do screw in recovery points.
I did that once. I won’t try it again because it quickly became clear that every car made nowadays has a front end fully enclosed by a giant plastic bumper cover and no hook points. If you try to hook underneath the bumper cover to an A-arm or something you’ll rip it off. I ended up attaching to the crossmember above the radiator and pulling extremely gently.
Maybe I should have done like Matt and wrap the strap down around my own rear axle to lower the pull forces.
I don’t know how tow trucks manage it with modern cars.
All modern cars have tow points front and back, just have to read The Adventures of Manuel Del Owner
I thought this when i pried open the little cover on the bumper of our 2013 Dart. Behind that cover was just a solid aluminum bumper, no place to thread a tow eye into. The farthest forward tow point I could find was a slot on the frame rail under the drivers floor where a T-hook could be inserted.
My wife managed to get that car stuck 3 different times and I dreaded having to dig under the middle of the car each time to recover it.
Should have been there. Maybe a bad part from crash repairs?
We ordered the car new and that was the factory setup. I did replace the bumper reinforcement years later after a collision and the factory replacement part also came without any recovery option. I think it was a US spec cost saving thing.
My mk3 US Focus didn’t. For the bowline on my kayaks, I had to get this half-assed foam strap anchor thing that the hood closed down upon to hold in place. I had about as much faith in it as Scotch tape.
I pulled out the recovery screw-in eye and installed it in one of the front locations to act as a tie-down for a load of 12′ 2x4s on the roof rack. Worked great.
Good guy and it probably is fun!
There aren’t enough 2-door Broncos. I mostly see 4-doors and the 2-doors are so much better looking. Also, did that Legacy have bald tires? At least there was no problem finding a tow hook on that.
I wondered why I was so bored with the bronco a while back, and I finally realized it’s because most of the ones I’d see were 4 door.
2 door Broncos look great.
Like with Jeep Wranglers the 2 Doors sell the 4 Doors.
Whenever I see a 2-door Wrangler (JK/JL) or Bronco, I do a double take, as if the owner customized it like that. Same with the VW GTI. Funny how 4/5-door vehicles become our “mental norm”
But when I see an older CJ or the OG Bronco, they look perfectly fine to me.
N.B. It’s I-84, not I-48.
Also the Columbia River Gorge is notorious for ice storms: It’s a major outlet for cold air from the east side of the Cascades flowing out to meet moist air from the ocean.
Yep, when I lived there I was always cautious leaving my house when there was fresh snow on the ground, because each time I wasn’t I’d bust my butt on the layer of ice beneath the snow. Most of the Willamette Valley gets a bit of reprieve because of the Coastal Mountain Range acting as a buffer, but the Columbia River lets that moist air just run in. The number of times I nearly pooped myself while sliding on black ice on the I-205 bridge…
Good for him! Great story. In the early 60s my father worked for Tri-State construction in Indianapolis. His company truck was a yellow Ford with heavy duty bumpers. That’s all I can remember about it. He was a gentleman of his time and would always rescue those stuck in snow. We were heading home after a father-son haircut when we came upon a car with its rear end in a shallow ditch. Dad stops, gives the guy a friendly wave, and gets a chain from the truck. He never just hooked to a bumper, always looked for a good point beneath. As he’s starting to kneel down the guy asked who Tri-State’s insurance carrier was, “In case you damage my car.” I was 7 or 8 at this time but even I knew this guy messed up. Dad calmly puts the chain back in the truck and says, “Sorry Mister. I ain’t got no GAWDAMNED INSURANCE!” We left him there, but it wasn’t the middle of nowhere. I miss my Dad.
I love that it’s just something that he does regularly too.
I am surprised that the M/Ts are up to the task, muddies aren’t exactly snow rated.
It might not have been that cold- maybe in the 40s. It’s Portland, not Fargo.
Looking at the photos, it’s clearly below freezing.
The new KO3s have the triple peak snow rating, and from reviews on Tire Rack they seemingly do better in the snow than the Michelin Aegis Crossclimate tires.
I’ll probably get KO3s for my “summer” tires and may compare them in the snow to my KO2s (which were shit in the snow TBH), but I’ll definitely have a dedicated winter tire for all four wheels and the the spare in the winter.
There are a few A/T options that have the triple peak rating such as the K03s you mention as well as the AT3W/AT4Ws. There are no M/Ts that I know of that have the triple peak rating.
Ah, my bad, didn’t realize the distinction between M/Ts and A/Ts.
I had Mastercraft Courser M/Ts on my 99 Blazer and it was great it snow. Drove through a foot of it one winter without a problem, and six inches or less was like it wasn’t there at all.
Rod,Exactly what you said.
Look at UPS trucks ,FedEx trucks that have to get out everyday in the snow (northern Wisconsin,Michigan,,Minnesota etc),they are all using a soft compound tire with micro siping (that at least works great till it wears down).Experience has taught these companies that great winter tires are cheap in the long run
These tires don’t last long at all but they are cheap insurance,especially when a tow truck is several hundred dollars to pull them out after slow speed sliding off a driveway or rural road.
This is awesome.
Also, that Bronco is a beaut. Love the two door Sasquatch look.
I’ve been binge-watching Season 3 of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING (yeah, I know I’m late to the game) so the first thing to pop into my head was:
CoBronco
Props to the man. A true Samaritan. I once had trouble getting up and icy hill in my Honda Civic which is a beast in the snow. During my last attempt as I gave up and pulled to the side a marine in a Humvee, the real one, pulled in front hopped out of the truck hooked up a strap pulled me up the hill and disconnected and was gone before I could hop out and help. Kudos to great people.