The actual trip trying to GET to Lake Mountain...

Nate and I, both equipped with CB radios, headed out for our little excursion Saturday night leaving behind the pavement and running into a lot of melted snow and icy, watery mud underneath of it. We followed the main road all the way to were it bends and elevation starts to increase up the shoulder of Lake Mountain. After 20 mins or so of driving we ran into some deep snow (two and a half feet) and the danger of sliding off the steep road was getting iminent with our constant attempts of running up the hill at full speed. Once Nate was extracted from the snow with the Blazer, we decided to turn around for home but try a different route. We had found a road or whats supposed to have been a road and ran into some iced over puddles that looked to be frozen. I proceeded to drive through with my Blazer and managed to break through the ice from the weight of the truck. I then realized that this puddle was more of an iced over pond from the depth of it. I immediately accelerated in hopes to keep my momentum and pull through to the other side. Mud, water and ice chunks flew up in the air landing on the hood and windows as I pushed the engine close to it's rev limiter. My forward progress seemed to stop all together, so I let off the gas and got out and realized that my seven foot tall trail beast was about four and a half feet submerged into this now churned up icy mud hole. Nate in his Jeep Cherokee, tried to no avail pull me free from the goo with two long tow straps. It might as well been a Tonka truck hooked up to mine as the Jeep would stop dead in it's tracks as soon as the slack in the straps would pull tight. To end the trip, I finally called my cousin who has a Chevy Duramax diesel pickup to come extract my three and a half ton rig. Needles to say, it still took another forty-five minutes of dang near breaking the straps or ripping off his reciever hitch to jerk my truck hard enough to get me out of the drink. Maybe next time I can get closer to obtaining my goal on reaching the TV towers in the winter time with a little less snow and a lot less mud holes....