Black Hawk forced to rescue Jeep after driver gets it stuck on a remote Alaskan glacier

The driver of a Jeep Grand Cherokee has gotten the car bogged in a glacier in Alaska. 

The Jeep ZJ was being driven up the Knik Glacier Trail – a difficult 20-mile off-roading route – when it fell off the path and slid into melted glacial water. 

“We still don’t quite understand why or how they even got that far in there,” the local towing and recovery guys said.

READ MORE! BMW driver gets his $145,000 B3 Touring stuck on a hiking trail after blindly following GPS 

The recovery company, Elite Towing & Recovery, tried to reach the Jeep with their rescue truck, but couldn’t due to heavy rainfall and high water crossings. 

“The place it got stuck at has a lot of underwater pits and is very dangerous to travel on,” they said on Facebook. 

“We tried numerous times to get across Metal creek to get to the glacier but the waters were too high.”

Elite Towing & Recovery said they couldn’t just sit around and wait for the water to subside to rescue the truck because the glacier was a national monument. 

Because of this, the department of natural resources got involved and basically ordered the car out ASAP. 

Essentially, because the Jeep was sitting in water, it needed to be pulled out before any fuel or oil started to leak out. 

So, they were forced to call in the big guns.

When Northern Pioneer Helicopters was called, they deployed a UH-60 Black Hawk to the job. 

And if you’re wondering if that’s expensive or not, it is. 

The company told TheDrive the Black Hawk costs more than $8,000 per hour to charter. 

“It was a very expensive recovery, but not nearly as expensive as it would have been on the owner and insurance company had it just been left there,” Elite Towing & Recovery said.

When they got there, the rescue team attached straps to the first-generation Jeep Grand Cherokee and heaved it up into the air. 

And because they could only find spots on the passenger’s side to attach the straps to, the car was pulled up on its side. 

But considering the cost of the old car compared to the cost of the $8,000-an-hour Black Hawk, that decision wasn’t really questioned by the owner or insurance company.