The Most Bittersweet Recovery We've Ever Done...Ron and Beverly Barker (@MikePatey Collab)

want to begin with breaking news heartbreaking news tonight an urgent plea for help to find a missing couple they went missing in the nevada desert 72 year old ronnie and 69 year old beverly barker have been found but ronnie and beverly barker were found together inside their kia about two miles away from their rv in nevada but sadly ronnie barker did not survive [Music] now this was a long and terrifying process for ronnie and beverly's family exactly it's just a devastating situation for the family and we don't know any details of how the couple came to be where search crews found them on a mountain or mrs barker's condition or how her husband ronnie passed we do know what their traveling route looked like family tells us that they started in albany oregon they were taking a west coast rv trip they left on march 26th bound for tucson arizona but they didn't make it that far their family tells us the couple's rv was found earlier today in the mud in a mountainous area west of silver peak nevada about 30 minutes away from coledale where their cell phone last pinged off a cell phone tower last sunday so here's the deal ron and beverly barker were on an rv trip i understand they were headed from up north down towards like the arizona area we don't know exactly how or why they got off the main road somebody said that maybe their gps had main highways turned off or something quirky like that happened but basically they just started kind of traveling up into the mountains and these are some very very remote mountains just west of tonapan nevada we're west of a place called silver peak it's just kind of no man's land all right guys got something special for you today it's the recovery video that you've all been requesting the collaboration that everybody wants to see well i love you i want to see it a lot of people comments want to see it and it's between us and this gentleman right here mr mike petty finally dude we're doing a video together it's about time and not just annual video but we're doing a search and rescue video which is pretty uh wait till you hear the story i don't know how much you know about it but very little i was talking to the sheriff's department uh several days ago offering the helicopter if they needed another bird down there but i haven't got an update since yeah this one's uh this one's kind of a bittersweet one for sure so right now we're uh we just flew down to spanish fork airport and now we're jumping in the pavement pilatus uh because it's literally a pickup truck we're loading it with tools uh equipment and then we're headed out to come upon nevada and then from there about another hour west and kind of like the depth on mountains all right guys so we just touched down here at the tonopah airport in tonopah nevada which is quite literally smack dab in the middle of nowhere you got vegas that way you've got sacramento that way you got salt lake that way southern california is that way and we're just right here so we just flew over the site where the vehicles are abandoned we did uh see the rv found it uh the kia soul was buried in the trees a little bit deeper so uh we haven't found that yet but we're unloading all of our tools and we've got the trucks uh coming from reno that are gonna meet us here in about 20 minutes or so super grateful for mike petey and uh mike when did i text you yesterday yesterday i was in florida so i texted mike yesterday he's in florida on a family vacation he's like i'll find the next flight home i'm like dude like don't come home yeah like come on when you're supposed to so he flew home last night we jumped in the plane this morning and mike lives for search and rescue though so he's like he wasn't going to miss out on this so this would be a difficult a different one for you because the bodies have already been recovered you know the uncle ron who passed away uh then they airlifted his wife up to reno but she can't get back home to indiana without her rv that has all of her medical equipment in it which is what we're going to get which you just saw so a little different this is more like one of our recoveries yeah our vehicle type stuff so it's definitely going to be interesting it's going to be like an hour and a half drive i think from here being optimistic it's probably closer to two but we'll see so just waiting on trucks we'll let up get out of here [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] yeah i mean this assuming that this was the route they took their gps was just really lying to him and i'm not gonna lie i've been i've been bamboozled by gps through here that uh before as well they're in a semi truck that decided to take us through death valley national park which doesn't allow semi trucks and by the time you pass the point of no return you realize that fuel all these different things come into consideration so you have to just decide like okay well maybe this is just a you know a little weird little detour we'll just follow it through so i don't know what gps they were following i don't know what route they were taking to get to where they're at now they would have had been on roads like this for at least two hours and they were not intentionally going off-roading that was not purposely triple through yosemite or something right the roads that they were taking started getting tighter and tighter and tighter until finally uh the rv got stuck and the rv was actually towing a little car dolly with a kia soul on it ron decided to unload the kia so they could drive out back to cell service and get help because the area where they were at was still probably 30 40 minutes away from the closest cell at service area in fact that's how search and rescue kind of knew where to look for them because their cell phone had pinged off a tower about 30 minutes you know nearby the deeper we're going right now the further away we're going away from anything like we're not getting closer to anything else on this side of the road we are about halfway to a site where the vehicles are at basically we're just kind of climbing the mountain um been coming in this way from tonopah making our way up these uh blm roads and i'm still not at 100 sure which route they took to get in here i would be very surprised if it was this route because this is really rough and really dirty and really rocky so um we're gonna find out we're gonna try to find out from the family exactly which way they came but basically it just keeps going and going and going and the gps just did them real dirty [Music] [Music] so we're in the vicinity of where the rv should be um we got some gps coordinates that got us to right here i think it's a little further off the road than we originally anticipated uh we're looking for the rv first and then next we'll go for the uh for the car the car is a little bit more of a sensitive deal because that's where ron died and the family has asked us to have a moment of silence and stuff over there before we touch it so we're gonna see just how uh just how smashed in this rv is in here i mean you could tell gps was just really messy with somebody in here and uh you can see exactly how a big rv like that could easily get entangled i believe we are in the general vicinity with the air of where the rv ended up these poor people out here with no cell service also we're eight thousand feet which is uh makes it hard to breathe especially for uncle ron the man who passed away because he had a bunch of his lung removed um from agent orange exposure in vietnam just the ultimate worst case scenario man if you're if you're them and you have uh no downloaded off trail maps and your gps has brought you to this point so far and you're cruising along you get to this right here what the hell do you do i mean is this the end of the road does the road continue to go ron the owner of the driver probably oh i mean look this is what he was gonna have to do he was basically gonna have to make this hairpin turn wasn't gonna work so as you can see it looks like it ripped the trailer hitch out of the back of the rv um for the car dolly car dolly looks like it's still gonna probably work possibly at least get it out of here the rv's got a good tire on that side shredded tire and rim on this side and oh looks like it's only got one flat tire which is awesome look at this can you imagine just following your gps and some of those angles back there they had to be feeling like they're going to tip over just driving on them and i know you're driving it out it's going to be fun but yeah getting to here and seeing it just switch back ron had a choice to make at this point he's probably super agitated you know uh you're super frustrated you're this far off trail your wife everything so he pulled it in here unloaded the kia and uh after getting the kia off of the car dolly they started going back the way they thought they came well unfortunately they made one wrong turn which took them down kind of a steep ravine at which point ron went to go turn around and it got stuck now keep in mind when they left the rv they thought they were just getting into their car to drive back into town so they didn't think about you know packing extra food extra water or any of that stuff no we've only got one blown tire up here we're gonna get this car dolly off [Music] they were literally using like printed off map quest seriously oh yeah [Music] [Music] got a tire [Music] now we give it a pull the yankem brodo's a rope and uh just gotta get up over this hump should pull up pretty easy we got the one flat tire replaced which is nice which means we have five spares for the drive out which we're probably gonna need because it's rough out of here man i feel so bad for these people oh all i'm seeing right now is the desperation they felt i'm yeah it was it wasn't that stuck i mean if they had had a vehicle that could tug on it they would have been in the same situation but keep in mind they they were not prepared for this are we unhooked what's he trying to do is turn around [Music] one more time [Music] all right camper is unstuck got the tire replaced got it turned around man they were in a tight spot and we're about to you're about to see how sketchy this really is and how it was like i'm not terribly nervous but if i was somebody that didn't have a ton of experience driving an rv or you know whatever this could be what we're about to experience could be like traumatizing it's going to be very very tippy this vehicle has a very high center of gravity and uh when you get off camera on stuff like this you're gonna feel all the stuff in the cabinet the shelves you wanna just yard sale the poor dude was freaking rock crawling while pulling his little car behind this oh and i'm sure he just hated that sound oh that's the whole belly of the freaking rv this is the easiest way to get this out the rear axle sits way forward from the actual back of the vehicle so anytime you take a turn it's like a lever so the back end of the vehicle swings way out so on tight trails like this i can make a turn that my truck would easily clear but if there's a tree on that side of the road the tail of the rv will hit it just those noises man all i can say is ron the guy who passed away hearing all these noises on his new camper just every single one of those gets me but the good news is we're driving it's still mechanically sound and now comes probably the the much much much harder part um we're gonna go to ron's final resting place where he passed away where they stayed basically cuddled up in the backseat of a of a little kia soul for days on end until they finally ran out of food water not knowing that their camper was quite literally just a short hike away sad stuff [Music] are we going [Music] so we just stopped for a second or waiting for the rest of the crew to get over here because uh now we gotta go down and pick up the kia which uh i'll explain in a minute is a little bit more of a sensitive experience but while we're here waiting for them assess some of the damage here this is actually a newer rv um gotta be 2012 or newer maybe even newer looks decent 19 000 miles uh you can see as they started getting tired through the trees in here things just started getting worse and more started scratching up everything started ripping off the rear panel there the rear bumper really is pretty much what saved them to be honest with you because that thing drags so much you can see it actually drug the metal clean off that's how it's supposed to look hopefully that's what those are for because otherwise there's not much clearance under there and not much traction with these tires you can see right here on the slide outs and all the canopies the awnings they've all just been abused by branches so again we want to make sure this vehicle is in tip-top shape as best we can because this is what uh beverly wife uh still has to drive back to indiana in because she's not able to fly there's some damage right there where it's been kind of low riding but overall looks like it uh should be able to make it the rest of the trip uh the inside i'll be fairly sensitive because i don't want to show too much personal stuff but i just want to show you guys how chaotic it was in here like all of their stuff i'm sure they didn't live like this i'm sure just bouncing around just caused all that stuff to bounce everywhere they were using their atlas and guide and doing their best pulled the gps coordinates here on onyx for where the kia soul is parked as you can see um any of the purple is actual trails um so the key is right down here so what we're going to do is basically come back down here connect on to this main road that we came in on and then uh that looks like there's gonna be a little turn off you know i don't get the kia from the camper i'm sure it felt like they were driving forever because they were taking wrong turns and going here going there but like i said it's literally you know less than half a mile away from where where they were where they had you know food and shelter and safety so after getting stuck in the kia they didn't really have much of a choice other than to sit and wait and hope that you know they would see a passing car and so for nine days straight they sat there honking sos on the horn of their little kia soul it finally ran out of fuel and ron i think somewhere on maybe the eighth or ninth day dehydration and you know just all the other things that kind of stack on top of him ended up taking his life you know beverly and he were sitting in the backseat of this little key and just cuddled up just just living their last moments together and when i first heard about the story man i just thought how tragic this is the most tragic thing ever but as i started talking with the family and the friends and different people involved they're they're really focused on like the bright side of this the happy side of it which is you know if you think about it what a way to go you're on an adventure with your wife cuddled up you know you just kind of die peacefully in her arms very traumatizing for beverly his wife obviously and probably the whole family and i'm not saying that this is a good thing i'm saying that there's some beauty in all this chaos so the kia we believe is down this road here so [Music] dig [Music] it another road down here [Music] cars right here guys yeah we got eyes on the car now um this is this is where they this is where ron died oh gosh dude the freaking walker [Music] and start seeing their stuff just scattered everywhere i mean dude they were like literally just trying to survive i guess uh the way they were getting water was she would come up since he wasn't able to walk after a few days she would get out with her walker come up scoop up one of her n95 masks with snow and then melt it into a water bottle and that's where they would get their water shoe i mean yeah there's a shoe a walker [Music] so our good friend barb who's here with her husband dave helping us recover these vehicles i found these two sticks and made this cross so that we could mark more ron's last adventure was because ron obviously went on the ultimate adventure he took his rv down the trail that he barely walked down he took his key out this trail got himself in a real pickle we went out with the love of his life and on a wild adventure so this barb made for him i'm gonna stick it right there by a tree kia was stuck and so forever be known as as we're on spot [Music] [Music] ah not much is that thing dead the needle's not even moving on [Music] [Applause] so we got the car started put the fuel in it jumped the battery started right up obviously they were living in here for a number of days obviously he passed away in here so whatever happened then so dealing with some some potential biohazard type of materials which is why wearing the mask so essentially what happened was search and rescue showed up the day after ron died so he had been in the car deceased for about 26 hours by the time search and rescue found him and was able to rescue them they were able to airlift beverly to reno and family members met her there fast forward to an email that i get on like april 6th or 7th from a guy named jeff mills you know i don't check all my emails but if it says something about a recovery i'll jump in there and look at it and it says hey here's here's the story here's what happened here's what needs to be recovered and uh here's the family's contact info if you if you're interested you know the story hit me pretty hard obviously so after reading it i was like yeah we're in i mean there's closer recovery companies out there but i guess one of the problems was they were having a hard time finding anybody that was willing to go up to that farven area to do the recovery and also there wasn't money from the family or anything like that that was available to be able to pay somebody for some crazy expedition so it was a perfect opportunity for us to jump in and say yeah you know we're in salt lake which is like a 12 hour drive away from where we're talking about we might be able to pull this off using some resources pulling from reno and then from home and then flying out there showing off it's a really cool jeep actually [Music] [Music] get it out of here i think he's gonna be happy for as sad as the situation was i think this is this is working out working out pretty damn well [Music] see this right here this is luxury we don't usually get this after recoveries normally after a coverage but go find like the nearest taco stand or whatever but yeah of you buying uh 300 worth of snacks or something and that's why that's daily occurrence that's like literally on a daily occurrence it's like every the nearest gas station because we're always in these podong towns with nothing but one gas station and i get a little carried away but right now we're on the side of the trail and she's literally cooking meatball sandwiches out of the back of her jeep okay this is going to be i feel like it's going to be an 800 sandwich and i'd pay yeah 100 that's this is this is amazing so we got the vehicles uh out rv's out running good all the tires are good it's actually running great the kia is on the trailer um that's running good uh for right now we're just kind of regrouping eating up and uh heading back to the airport about an hour away from total par right now and uh i think from there it's just well ladies and gentlemen that's it a successful recovery and the sun hasn't even gone down yet that's pretty amazing and it's amazing because we had an amazing group of people this was like a logistical miracle the fact that we were able to fly into this giant airfield here in the middle of nowhere that put us much closer to the recovery and then we had josh who works for us obviously gather his whole gang of people from reno apparently if you get in trouble in reno just call him because he had dave and barb and meatball sandwiches and jared and chris the guy who owns this truck just like literally just everybody just opened up the floodgates of help uh to help us get the rv and the kia and the little car dolly off the mountain as you can see everything is successfully down um rv's running good the kia is running fine uh we just got on the trailer just because it's easier to do than the car dolly and the car dolly will be pulled back separately from there i believe the car the kia is going to go to uh like a disaster like cleanup place to build to kind of like sanitize and clean out all the funk that's in there the rv's really not that bad of shape just needs to be cleaned up gone through because remember beverly yeah she has to travel back home to indiana in that because she can't fly so it's got to be perfect so we gave her a full tank of fuel um jared's going to be hot rod that baby home hey she hauls man she boogies and then from there me and the boys and mike and pilots and the whole gang here have loaded up the pickup truck as you can see with that's like a lot of tools that's not just when mike's like hey how many how much weight are you bringing i'm like 100 pounds of tools it's like 400 pounds of tools but the plot is going to handle it because it's an amazing aircraft so with that said thank you for joining us enjoy and stay tuned for the next one long story short we put together this logistical you know wizardry of josh thompson the uh our parts guy been with us for a long time good friend of mine he's originally from reno so he called some friends in reno and they stepped up big time a couple named dave and barb brought up their pickup truck along with a car hauler trailer and then another friend of uh josh's loaned us his truck six spare tires because we knew the rv had uh some tires that were bad a bunch of tools so we flew josh out to a reno he met up with his friends and then they started driving south which is where we then flew into with mike petey uh mike patty and i have been doing a lot of business and a lot of cool stuff together lately you know he does a lot of search and rescue he does more of like the actual recovery of bodies and that type of thing where we do more vehicle stuff but he was excited literally dropped everything he was doing and uh said you know you know let's meet tomorrow morning and we'll fly to tonopah so after i got the email from jeff mills you know i obviously got super interested in figuring out how we could help that soon put me in touch with a guy named travis peters travis is from indiana he is ron and beverly's nephew so he uh he's the one who i spoke with he's gonna give me all the details and said if you guys can do this it'd be amazing so working with him and then um i believe to one of beverly's kids i'm not 100 sure who all we worked with here because there's a lot of different people but basically the family helped us identify the coordinates we jumped in the trucks drove up these winding mountain roads which started as just dirt roads and then they turned to gravel roads and then they started turning into like just kind of off-road trails and then by the time we found that rv so deep up in those mountains it was literally like a rock crawling trail i don't know what gps they were following or what was happening but this was literally like this is a terrain that would be hard in a jeep and a utv and stuff like that just because it's steep uh rocky loose dirt loose gravel you know whining in and out of trees basically heading to the top of a mountain but along the way for me i was experiencing like this huge like empathetic moment where i was kind of feeling the distress that they might have been feeling along the way like this road doesn't feel right or that branch just about ripped off the top of the rv or why are these rocks getting so close to the sides of the vehicle why are we bottoming out and basically it's kind of the point of no return when you're driving an rv that big that's only two wheel drive and you're pulling a little trailer behind you that doesn't back up very well you don't have a ton of options to stop and you know turn around or back up so i think he was just following the road to the point where he hoped that there was a big enough turnaround area which he turned into got stuck and that's how they ended up having to jump in their little kia and drive down the mountain so ultimately you know after seven eight nine days of very little food very little water you know very poor ability to breathe at that altitude according to the the official report or the news reports um ron did end up dying of dehydration they ran out of water basically and uh they like i said beverly was there for 26 hours with him hell search and rescue showed up so that's another moment that i just man like thinking about that and then when we got down to the car when we finally found the kia using gps coordinates it was just the most tragic thing i've ever seen there was like a shoe you can see someone like whatever little snack wrappers they had and then right outside the car door was a walker when i saw that walker i almost lost it because i pictured beverly having to get out use a walker go up the hill use basically a covered mask scoop it full of snow walk back down put that into a water bottle and then defrost it and drink it that's how they were getting their water like that's just it's a rough rough time that was one of the biggest things that i experienced during this whole recovery it wasn't a difficult recovery i mean logistically it was a little challenging getting vehicles from here and there and flying in but as far as pulling the vehicles out it went pretty much according to plan uh we used the protozoa income rope and only had to tug on the rv two or three times before we were able to get it completely out and turned around and then we used the winch on dave and barb's jeep to kind of just pull the key off the hillside so very simple stuff as far as you know actual grunt and horsepower goes i think ultimately bad directions um you know bad gps whatever it was and then i believe a mixture of i don't know what time of day they were traveling but it could have been getting later and then the ground looked like it was wet so they were definitely traveling through either rain or possible snow but the trail was dry when we went to go recover them but you could tell that it wasn't dry when they were driving through there so that just was another factor that caused them to get stuck up there just crazy that for nine days they would have to sit there and honk the horn and hope that somebody would drive by in such a remote rural area that nobody was in that area for you know those nine days or nobody heard them i think the hardest part for me was was seeing how close they were to their rv the kia from the rv straight line distance it couldn't have been more than half a mile we were able to we were able to walk there in 10 minutes so had they known they just didn't know where they were in relation to the rv so maybe even had they known their health condition wouldn't allow them to get there but it was it's so sad to see that dying of dehydration and starvation and stuff like that when you're half a mile away from something that that could have saved your life obviously it wasn't meant to go that way this all happened for a reason beverly has told some beautiful stories to her family that i've heard bits and pieces of about you know ron's final moments together and i guess it turned into a really religious really spiritual really i mean hard to say good thing but they're making the most of it and they found a lot of beauty in in this tragedy so basically once we got the vehicles off the mountain we loaded them back up and the rv and the kia and the car dolly all got taken up to reno which is where beverly was currently staying because she needs the rv to be able to travel back to indiana because she's not able to fly due to you know health reasons big big shout out to josh thompson big shout out to barb and dave eaton shout out also to josh's buddy jared who came and helped those people jumped in and just didn't even ask questions i mean barb was literally making us meatball sandwiches out of the back of her jeep which was amazing so amazing crew there on my side super grateful for all my guys that uh you know the regular crew got together and and uh also for mike patty and let us take this plane and uh the couple guys that he came with him another shout out i want to give is to jeff mills for sending me the email making me aware of the situation he and his wife actually drove up and met us in tonopah so they came up and helped us brought their truck and were a huge help and they had no connection to the family they didn't didn't know who they were jeff just saw the story on the news and and he wanted to help so i'm glad he reached out and then he also put his money where his mouth was and showed up drove like nine hours to meet us and help us out it was a big group effort but uh ultimately we were able to get the rv off the mountain and be able to just really leave a little bit of the stress that that family had been experiencing and they were extremely grateful and i think we've made friends for life with them for now so like i said one of our most bittersweet but also most gratifying recoveries there is a takeaway here from this vlog this is something that we can all actually kind of learn from and this is something that the family was actually hoping that i would communicate is just preparation like being fully prepared even if you don't think you need something grab it just to be safe especially when you're going out in the wild camping or an rv trip or hiking or whatever if you grab one water bottle grab two you know if just you can never be too prepared and also don't underestimate nature you know it'll bite you really quick you can end up getting stuck we've i've got some of our trucks stuck in situations where i would never expect it to get stuck before but if you aren't smart with the weather and you go anyways that can that can come back and bite you so definitely some good lessons to learn sounds like common sense to a lot of us but some people need to hear it and and i think we all just need to be reminded of it so

Channel: HeavyDSparks

Views: 2,557,625

Keywords: gta 5 tow truck roleplay, towing, gta 5 tow truck job, snowrunner, susan powell, true crime, josh powell, trailers, no swearing, tug of war, Recovery, Diesel, Diesel brothers, Heavy equipment, Caterpillar, Whistlindiesel, Cleetus McFarland, Demolition ranch, Matt’s Offroad, Yankum, Mud, Adventure, Heavydsparks, Sparks motors, Freedom bus, Dirt, Dirt work, Tractor, Machine, Dave sparks, Diesel Dave, Dieseldave, murder, smash, tow truck, wrecker, blue collar, mike patey, ron and beverly barker

Id: 2SvuZ_y75EU

Length: 35min 48sec (2148 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022