It’s never good when your 4×4 breaks off-road, but it’s bound to happen. That’s a risk you accept any time you hit the trail. Matters are made worse, though, when the rig is so broken it won’t move, leaving you without many options to retrieve it. We’ve seen these jobs go impressively well and we’ve seen them go as poorly as you’d expect—and tragically, this busted-up Jeep Cherokee’s recovery falls into the latter category.
Rob Smith is now the not-so-happy owner of an XJ with a missing rear wheel, a crushed driver’s side, and a roof that’s been peeled like the lid of a tin can. On the other side of it is the staff at Lake of the Ozarks Off-Road Park 2—nicknamed “the LOOP”—who got the Jeep out when no one else could. There’s a lot of he-said, she-said between them, but at least two things are true: The Cherokee is no longer stuck and it’s no longer trail-worthy.
Smith argues it didn’t have to be this way. His son was driving the mildly built XJ around the park when he sheared the rear wheel off the driver’s side, leaving it incapacitated. He let it sit overnight before asking the facility’s staff if they could recover it.
“The park was nice enough to bring a loader down and help get it back to camp and put it on my trailer,” Smith wrote in a Facebook post. “Only problem is my Jeep had no broken windows except the back hatch, and my doors and roof were perfectly fine.”
You can see that isn’t the case anymore. Smith posted photos of the recovery’s aftermath as well as a video that shows the Jeep being held high in the air with the loader’s forks going through the roof. There’s certainly a lot more damage now than there was before. But as one park staffer explains, Smith’s son knew that would be the case and still approved the recovery.
Hardin Sunderland, the loader operator, replied with a post of his own in The Loop 2 Facebook group. He says he told Smith’s son that the forks weren’t long enough to scoop up the Jeep from underneath without damaging the transmission, transfer case, or driveline. “They said they had rolled the windows down and [told us] to just run the forks through the door windows and pack it out because they were going to cage it anyways,” Sunderland wrote.
That’s exactly what Sunderland did. And as you might expect, a Jeep built roughly 30 years ago can’t survive that type of operation unscathed. It’s no surprise, then, that the SUV ended up in this kind of shape.
The accusations flew back and forth online. Smith claimed The LOOP 2 deleted his post to silence him, while Sunderland quotes Smith as saying he’d “ruin us.” Commenters are picking sides, too, as almost everyone engaging with Smith’s post says the park was in the wrong. Meanwhile, dozens of drivers who frequent The LOOP 2 chimed in to offer support. “Too many good people enjoy the parks to let these clowns get you down,” one visitor said. “Glad you put your foot down, man,” another added. “You don’t know me at all and went out of your way to help when I broke mine a few weeks back. The fact that someone is trying to take advantage of that is crazy.”
Smith told me he doesn’t plan to sue the park despite several people suggesting that in the comment section. “I never said my son was correct at everything but the person operating the loader could have used a little more common sense,” Smith explained over direct message. “It’s not worth my time to take any action against the park. [I] used to have a great time going there, never had any problems, and now one time my son goes by himself it turns to shit.”
As for The LOOP 2, ownership has banned Smith and his son from coming back while adding that “from this day forward, if you break or need help getting your rig out of the park you are on your own!” The Drive reached out to the park but didn’t hear back before publishing.
Smith says he’ll rebuild the Jeep and simply take it to other parks in the area. It was going to need some work one way or another, and now, I can almost guarantee a full cage is in the plans.
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