A modular home slid over a cliffside in the Colorado Rocky Mountains when the semitractor-trailer hauling it up a steep, icy road in Blue River slipped downhill and jackknifed just before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Getting the home back on the truck without damaging it beyond repair proved to be one of the most difficult missions Mountain Recovery, a Silverthorne-based towing company, has ever completed, according to Charlie Stubblefield, the company’s owner.

“It was definitely top five in terms of level of difficulty,” Stubblefield said, “and it’s because you’re dealing with an oversized load. It’s 13 feet, 6 inches tall, 16 feet wide and 60 feet long.”

Mountain Recovery was there Tuesday night, Nov. 21, when the modular home slid off the mountainside. Stubblefield said the homeowner had called the tow company because the semitractor-trailers that had hauled the disassembled home most of the way to its destination were struggling to complete the last stretch up a dirt road off Colorado Highway 9.

Mountain Recovery had one of its heavy wreckers on scene, and the operator had towed the first semitractor-trailer halfway up the hill before it was able to make it the rest of the way on its own, Stubblefield said.

But after the company helped tow the second semi to the halfway point up the hill, that driver also decided to try to make it the rest of the way on his own, even though the truck’s chains weren’t on well, Stubblefield said. 

Mountain Recovery’s tow operator had warned the semi driver he might need to chain up better or consider another option, but the driver didn’t listen, he said.

“He went for it,” Stubblefield said. “We’re assuming he missed a gear, because when you miss a gear you have to stop when you have that much load. He came to a stop halfway up this incline, and just slid back, jackknifed, and then the modular home slid off the edge.”

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By the next morning, Mountain Recovery had been called back to the scene to try to recover the modular home. The tow company briefly considered using a crane but realized that, with the Thanksgiving holiday, it would be hard to locate one big enough, Stubblefield said. Besides, he said, the outriggers — the legs that stabilize the crane while it hauls — would be too big for the narrow mountain road.

So the tow company devised another plan, centered around its two 50-ton rotator trucks, known as The Hulk and The Side Piece, Stubblefield said. Unlike a typical tow truck that has a boom that picks cars up from the back, these rotators have a boom that can rotate 360 degrees around the truck, he said.

Those rotating booms allowed two operators with wireless controls to sync up their rotations in order to get the correct angles to help the wood-frame structure up and over the edge of the mountainside.

“(The modular home) weighed 32,000 pounds,” Stubblefield said. “It was never meant to be on anything other than super flat ground, and now we have it in the most extreme position, which is off an embankment a guy can’t even stand on. It’s a 45-degree angle or better.”

Completing a job like this requires not only the kind of heavy equipment that few other Colorado tow companies have, but also skilled operators who know how to rig up the cargo and work in coordination to pull it out, Stubblefield said.

In all, Mountain Recovery had eight winches connected to the two 50-ton rotators and a 12,000-pound Bobcat vehicle for support, Stubblefield said. In order to keep the modular home from crumbling “like a pile of toothpicks,” he said the team had to figure out how to spread the rigging out to evenly distribute the weight.

“All those operators and all those winches had to be in sync so that the load stays distributed and it doesn’t just go to some of the straps or one of the straps,” Stubblefield said. “So it’s really a coordinated dance. They had to be perfectly synchronized so that every point that touched the house had the same amount of pressure.”

It took about nine hours to recover the modular home, Stubblefield said, describing a “teeter totter effect” that Mountain Recovery had to counteract to get the structure over the top of the steep ledge. 

Somehow, the modular home was mostly intact.

“The amazing thing was when it went off it didn’t sustain a lot of damage,” Stubblefield said. “It sustained some. But the modular home had many large windows, sliding doors, things of that nature. None of them were broken when it went into the hole. And none were broken when it came out.”

On Thanksgiving Day, Mountain Recovery hauled the modular home the rest of the way up the mountain to its final destination. 

With delays in the supply chain since the COVID-19 pandemic, the homeowner had hoped to save the structure so he and his family could move in without delays, Stubblefield. So, “the idea was to save and salvage whatever we could so these people still have a home in a timely fashion,” he said.

“Did it get damaged in the recovery? Yes,” Stubblefield said. “Beyond repair? I don’t think so.”