A bad recovery is worse than being stuck. Yank on a bumper instead of a frame point and you've added a body shop bill to the tow. Every City Towing driver assesses the pull angle, the anchor, and the surface before the winch line goes tight. We carry snatch blocks, tree-saver and kinetic straps, soft shackles, recovery boards, and cribbing on every truck, and our International MV607 flatbeds have hydraulic winches with enough line to reach well off the road.
What we can and can't reach
We're honest about this on the phone. A flatbed can run graded dirt roads, most OHV staging areas, and firm desert two-track. It can't crawl five miles of rock garden. If you're deep on a technical trail, we'll meet you at the nearest point a truck can reach and talk through getting the vehicle to us — sometimes that's a second recovery vehicle, sometimes it's your buddy's Jeep and our strap. We don't run heavy-duty recovery; for a semi or a loaded RV we'll point you to the right outfit rather than waste your time.
Our territory
Every OHV area and BLM corridor around Barstow: Johnson Valley (including the Hammers), Stoddard Wells, El Mirage, Rasor, the Calico hills and Mule Canyon, Coyote Lake, Harper Lake, the Mojave River bed, and the trails off Yermo, Daggett, Newberry Springs, Hinkley, Lucerne Valley, Ludlow and Baker. ETAs off-pavement are longer than our highway bands — dispatch will tell you the real number for where you are.
Winch-only vs. recovery + tow
If we pull you free and the vehicle drives, you pay for the winch-out only — see our winch-out service. If it won't drive after the recovery (bent tie rod, cracked oil pan, dead from the dunking), it goes on the flatbed and we take it to the shop you choose. Both are quoted before we leave Barstow.
