The Belly Dump on the Hogback

By George L. Nitti

On a narrow mountain road south of Missoula, Montana, a belly dump truck slipped just inches too far toward the edge of Rock Creek Road. “Those guys were actually building the road,” said Scott Wolff, owner of Iron Horse Towing. “There’s a place up there called the Hogback, like a mountain pass kind of thing, and the guy got too close to the edge and the trailer sucked him off.” The unit rolled nearly 200 feet down the steep slope. 

When Wolff and his team made the long, slow 90-minute drive into the mountains, the scene offered almost no margin for error. “The biggest problem with that whole deal is we didn’t have any room to work,” he said. “The road is a single-lane road and that truck was super heavy. Fortunately, it emptied itself on the way down, so we didn’t have to worry about that.” 

For the recovery, Wolff brought his 2018 Peterbilt 1150 rotator along with a smaller 16-ton wrecker. “We brought our Freightliner M2, the 16-ton,” he explained. “The reason we did that is because we didn’t have any place to turn the rotator around, but I knew we’d need a second truck. That little truck is the only truck that could get turned around in there and still be strong enough to do what we needed it to do.” 

Because the tractor and trailer had separated on the way down, the team worked on them individually. “There’s no way we’re gonna have room to work to get the whole thing up as a unit,” Wolff said. “We were able to separate the truck and trailer and then we rigged the tractor part of it.” 

They used the rotator to lift while the 16-ton acted as an anchor against the slope. “We’d get up with the rotator and then we used the 16-ton snatch-blocked off some trees to keep the back of the tractor from sliding down the hill,” he said. “We kind of worked them together and seesawed up the hill.” The tractor finally crested the shoulder. “I didn’t have enough room to get the rotator up beside me because there wasn’t enough shoulder,” he noted. 

After towing the tractor to a wider turnout, they returned for the belly dump trailer as darkness settled over the ridge. “We rigged to trees that were up the hill… to get it between us,” Wolff said. The rotator lifted to keep the trailer from digging deeper, while the 16-ton steered and controlled its line of travel. “All that dirt on the side was soft because it came out of the trailer when it went over,” he added. “I was tucked up against the bank on the other side so that made it real tricky. I couldn’t put the rotator up on a decent platform to do any kind of really significant cycling.” 

“It was about a 12-hour job,” Wolff said. “And an hour and a half to get to the scene. I’ve been on recoveries where it takes about six or seven hours to get there.” 

For Wolff, it’s the nature of the terrain and the business. “There’s a lot of long drives and a lot of places where there’s no room to make a mistake,” he said. But after 35 years in the industry, he still embraces the challenge: “Every day is different and every day is a challenge, and I really like that.”