If you’ve never been to the Great Salt Lake, the namesake of Salt Lake City Utah, or any of the surrounding salt flats like Bonneville, you can’t fathom just how foreign the landscape is or how harsh it can be. I’ve been going out there for several years and can tell you that it is truly something special to see and experience Heavy D and Dave, from the Diesel Brothers, live near Salt Lake City and are always out helping with recoveries and such on the lake. These recoveries are always successful, but never go to plan, and almost always result in way more work than you might think.
In this video, they take an Oshkosh HET with a boom and crane and recovery equipment on it and go out to try and recover an actual wheeled crane that was lost in a barge crash in the 1980s. It’s now visible because the lake level is low, and the ground is firm enough that they think they can recover it without sinking more equipment. They think they can.
If you aren’t familiar with an Oshkosh HET, it stands for Heavy Equipment Transporter and they are usually 6-8 wheeled monsters. Heavy D’s is an 8 wheeled monster that rolls on ultra high flotation tires and it still has some issues with the surface. This is a fun video but it isn’t without carnage, that’s for sure.
Seems like a better name for this show would be “Brute Force & Ignorance”.