Technical > Tips
How To Escape Quicksand
story and photos by Christian Probasco
The problem: quicksand
To many, the word “quicksand” brings to mind images of intrepid explorers in pith helmets being sucked down to gooey deaths and camels and Bedouins disappearing into the undermined earth near springs. But if you four-wheel in Southern Utah, like I do, you probably associate quicksand with stuck cows and stuck vehicles. In fact, you can find quicksand almost anywhere there is water and it can have a deleterious effect on your itinerary and even your budget if you’re not prepared for it. But if you have the right tools and you know how to deal with quicksand, you can usually recover your vehicle from it in little time.
By “the right tools,” I mean a Hi-Lift jack and a shovel. Of course, if you’ve got an electric or hydraulic winch and there are trees nearby, you’re pretty much set. Also, if you’re traveling with buddies and you’ve got a tow strap, their vehicles might be able to pull yours out of the muck. But if your vehicle is buried above its axles in a sucking mire and you don’t have a regular winch and your nearest friend is hundreds of miles away, that’s when you have to pull out your Hi-Lift jack and get to work.
The solution: Hi-Lift jack and shovel
That’s right — work. If you can’t afford a winch, or have not gotten around to buying one, or, if you can’t afford to call a wrecker on your cell phone, you will have to work. You can console yourself with the fact that while a top-of-the-line winch can set you back several hundred dollars, and air lockers, which may or may not help you to get unstuck, usually cost about the same, you can buy a Hi-Lift jack and a shovel for less than a hundred bucks.
It’s no myth that quicksand looks no different than solid ground. Your first warning that you’ve encountered quicksand will probably be your vehicle’s velocity rapidly bogging down to zero and your vehicle settling on one side. “No problem,” you might think, “I’ll just put it in four-wheel low,” and if you are like 99% of drivers, you’ll do just that and try to rock the vehicle back onto solid ground, and you’ll end up digging your tires down into the muck until the vehicle’s frame rests on its surface, at which point you will be truly stuck
If you’ve really thought ahead, you might have brought along a couple of lengths of binder chain or some other high-tensile chain at least 3/8 inch thick, and a couple of D-shackles. You can attach one end of the first chain to your vehicle’s tow hook or bumper and the other end, by a shackle, to the jack’s top clevis. The second length gets attached by D-shackle to the clevis on the running gear assembly and then wrapped around and secured to a tree, using a tree strap. If there aren’t any trees around, you can also use a pull-pal, which will anchor itself. With this set-up, you can winch your vehicle towards safety. Just set the reversing latch into the upward position and start pivoting the handle and when you’ve almost reached the top end of the jack, chock your vehicle’s wheels to hold it in place and-keeping a firm grip on the handle — release the reversing latch, draw the running gear back to the base and detach the chain and reattach it further up its length. In this manner, you can move your vehicle towards the high ground about one yard at a time.
Ten minutes of work to raise the right-rear wheel. Notice water line where wheel was originally sunk.
But if you don’t have any chains, don’t panic: you can still get out. The first thing you should do is collect rocks... lots of rocks. Pile them near, but not next to the wheels. Flat rocks are best, but you’ll have to use whatever is at hand. If you haven’t had the foresight to bring along a 2x6 board or you haven’t bought a base for your Hi-Lift jack, set four of the larger, flatter stones aside to use as a base.
If no stones are available, you’ll have to use short logs, but I’ve found, if I look long enough, I can always find rocks.
You should try to straighten out your wheels, but often this will be impossible until you get the front end jacked up. You will also have to decide whether you want to go forward or backward and that will depend on whether you traversed most of the morass before you became stuck in it or whether it goes on and on before you. Whatever your decision, you should build a rock road in line with your tires in the direction you want to travel. Pile rocks in front of or behind your wheels so that when you do get moving, your vehicle will have something sturdy to ride on. This road should extend back to solid land but you might be able to get by with less if you can get one axle up and out of the goo.
Impression of gas tank in quicksand.
Don’t, by the way, assume that just piling rocks around your wheels will unstick you, unless you can get them under the wheels as well, as described below. You might think that your tires will be able to get purchase on rocks which are wedged in front of and behind them but the tires will generally just spin against these as if they were covered with grease.
Having built the road, it’s time to build the foundation and base. If you’re in moderate quicksand, you might be able to jack up the front end and then the back end as a whole, but Hi-Lift itself advises against this kind of short-cut and if you’re stuck in the slurping, oozing, clutching goop that I tend to encounter, you’re going to have to raise one wheel at a time. You’ll want to determine where the jack is going to go and then dig down a foot or so. Throw three rocks that are at least fist-sized into the hole and place the base or one of the flatter rocks you saved earlier on top of them. Then put the jack on top of the base or flat rock.
Now you’re ready to start jacking up the vehicle and I should mention some safety points, because this is where safety starts to matter. If you value your brain cells, you would be wise to keep a very firm grip on the jack handle while raising the vehicle, but especially while lowering it. Also, it would be wise never to put your body, and especially your head across the plane through which the jack handle travels while you are operating it. Should you do this, and lose your grip on the jack handle, the handle may swing upward with the force of one quarter to one half of your vehicle’s weight and knock you on the side of your skull. If this caused unconsciousness, which it very well could, you might fall face-first into the muck you’ve been fighting and try to inhale water and sand, and that would probably be the end of you. So always be aware of where your head is in relation to the jack handle. Also, unless the jack handle is connected to the jack with a cotter pin, always remove the handle from the jack when you aren’t raising or lowering the vehicle. This will keep the jack from flinging the handle like a projectile if it should slip.
All four wheels out of the muck. Again, notice water lines on tires.
At first the jack will sink about three inches for every inch you raise your vehicle, and it might slide off the foundation and base you’ve built, but you should keep lifting until the jack starts to tilt too much to one side. In which case you’ll have to start over, or it hits bottom, in which case the former ratio of jack-sinking to vehicle raising will be reversed and you’ll start to see dramatic results.
All quicksand has a bottom to it — it’s just a matter of finding it. The quicksand you’re in might be three or more feet deep, but that’s why they make Hi-Lift jacks 48 and 60 inches high. I have had a 48 inch Hi-Lift buried until only the top eighteen inches was visible before the slop beneath it became solid enough to support one-quarter of my Jeep’s weight. It was leaning like the Tower of Pisa too, but I was able to get rocks underneath that tire.
Back on solid ground after 45 minutes.
And that’s your goal, to get a lot of rocks beneath your tires. Another safety tip: while sliding rocks beneath the tires, I have never actually put my fingers or hands beneath the tires, because I don’t imagine any good could come of doing that, especially if the vehicle slips off the jack.
While you have the tire raised up, you may as well air it down to between 15 and 20 pounds of pressure and if it’s a front wheel, try to straighten it out as best you can. Then you can lower it onto the rocks and get to work on the next tire. If you are in deep quicksand, your flat stone base has probably sunk out of existence and you’ll have to use another.
Follow these steps for each tire and you’ll soon have your vehicle on a firm foundation of stones. I can usually get my Jeep up on the rocks from even the worst quicksand in about 30 to 45 minutes. When you do have the vehicle raised, it’s just a matter of keeping the wheels straight and giving it enough gas to build momentum until you’re back on terra firma.