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Bill Smith is a Polaris ATV dealer, so he knows all about the power, True On-Demand All-Wheel Drive and strong chassis of Polaris Sportsman models.
Yet his appreciation for these traits was strengthened by leaps and bounds after a Sportsman 800 EFI H.O. saved him from a bad predicament on a remote mountain road.
A Sunday Drive
Smith, the general manager of Northstar Power Sports in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, went out for a Sunday drive with his wife Marty and her 90-year-old mother. They were about 100 miles from home, where the Smiths’ son and some friends had gone to ride ATVs in the mountains.
As the afternoon wore on, Bill Smith started driving home, and found him driving his GMC Envoy on a mountain road that resembled an old logging road.
“I started down the road and there was snow on the ground,” Smith told Polaris ESCAPE. “I stopped and couldn’t back up the hill, so I tried to go through. I did not realize when we went across a big hole in the road that it was full of water and frozen over, like a small pond. The Envoy broke through and it could not get out by itself. The water was probably 2 feet deep, and it was up to the running boards.”
The prospects of getting out of that predicament looked especially dire, Smithy said, “because there was absolutely no way a tow truck could get in there.”
Reaching Out to the Riders
Smith tried to call his son Doug, who was riding ATVs with his friends, but realized he was unlikely to get an answer if they were on the move.
“The area was so remote, I had a very poor signal,” he said. “I reached [Doug’s] wife back in town, 100 miles away,” but that contact only allowed him to leave a message in case Doug called home.
Smith walked to the top of the mountain road, just on the chance he might cross paths with someone riding their ATVs in the area.
“It’s an ATV riding area, so you could hear a few ATVs off in the distance,” Smith said. “You would hear a few of these guys but you could definitely tell the sound of that 800 dual exhaust. I heard that and thought it would be Doug, and he came over the hill right at me and he almost hit me.”
To say the least, Doug was surprised to come across his father – “he was totally flabbergasted,” Bill Smith said – and he and his fellow riders, Joel Ristvey and John Fierst, immediately got to work.
The Rescue
“They tied that Sportsman off to a tree and used the winch to pull the Envoy out of the hole,” Smith recalled. “I was afraid we would torque the frame of that Sportsman, but it didn’t bother that frame at all.”
The Sportsman successfully pulled the vehicle out of the hole, then pulled it up the hill, to a spot from where Smith could drive out of the area.
The help arrived none too soon.
“It was getting late in the afternoon and was starting to get dark,” Smith said. “We had a 90-year-old women in the vehicle who was beside herself, and those guys literally saved the day.
As Bill Smith noted on his website: “Bill thanks everyone that helped and is convinced that only that big Sportsman could have got them out that day.”
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