When the Olympics come around, I’ll often watch sports I am 100% ignorant of, just to see the best in the world doing their thing. It’s the competence at work, the striving, that I find compelling.
Like the Olympics, where NBC will strive to deliver narratives about athletes and their paths, good video or books can take you into another life/job/existence. It allows us, the reader/viewer, to visualize another existence; you even see it in museum dioramas and I think it’s a deep human trait.
Since discovering the Vinegar extension for Safari, I’ve found it a lot easier to browse YouTube. I uninstalled the YouTube app, and now solely use Safari on both iPad and desktop; this app is so good. Anyway, that’s what led me to today’s topic, Matt’s Off Road Recovery.
MORR, as I’ll call it here, is a YouTube channel started in 2019. It’s a family business in Hurricane, Utah, that does off-road towing, primarily for vehicles that get stuck in Sand Hollow State Park. Sounds boring? It’s not. Let me explain.
First off, the people are outstandingly competent. Owner Matt, son Rudy and Lizzy, are damned good at the work they do. Sand, snow, crazy steep rock, snow, trailers – oh my god they can back a trailer on a mountainside that looks like Everest – clever use of winches, pulleys and rigging, combining vehicle vectors… it’s a visual feast of ad-hoc problem solving to revel in. And that’s before you detour into the build videos and related channels doing advanced vehicle work.
There’s a host of supporting characters to recognize and enjoy, and the creators have done solid, careful work in establishing recurring patterns & motifs as well as investing in cameras, drones and lights to make the contents better. Like the canonical genius Clickspring, MORR is good at both videos and the work they do.
Lastly, they clearly have gone to a lot of trouble to remain apolitical and kind. In the work they do, often towing people who made bad decisions, lacked skills or inadequate vehicles, it would be simple to mock the customers but they never do. In 2022, when our national media is mainly afire with hate and status games, this is a wonderful thing to find.
I have no interest whatsoever in becoming an off-road recovery person. At the same time, I greatly enjoy watching them do so, and maybe you will too. Hit shuffle on his recovery playlist and be taken to another life.
On a purely personal note, my family owned two Corvair convertibles, so it was amazing to me to watch them create a monster off-road towing rig out of a Corvair wagon. Mad props.
And yeah, I am tempted to buy some swag.
ultracrepidarian 