Truck stuck in Yampa River removed before authorities arrive; driver’s identity unknown

A hunter walking the banks of the Yampa River just below the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Hubbard Cabin came across a disturbing sight Friday and called the Colorado Parks and Wildlife office in Steamboat.

What appeared to be a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck was stuck in the middle of the river, he told the agency. The truck’s driver was not around, the hunter reported, but it appeared the driver had steered the vehicle over a riparian zone to enter the river before getting stuck after attempting to turn around.

“The reporting party didn’t have license plate information and there didn’t appear to be anyone on scene when he observed the vehicle in the water, so we didn’t have a whole lot of information on it,” said Colorado Parks and Wildlife District Manager Kyle Bond.

With Bond farther away from the area, Stagecoach Senior Ranger Guthrie Lowe responded to the scene by 2:30 p.m. only to discover the truck had been removed from the river.

“I saw some tire tracks,” Lowe said. “I couldn’t tell if they were where (the truck) had entered or where it had exited, or both.”

It is unclear how the truck was removed from the river. A dispatcher for Rocky Mountain Towing & Delivery — the Steamboat Springs company that recovered a Jeep last year from the Yampa River after the vehicle launched off Routt County Road 14 and flew 65 feet before landing in the water — said they received no calls to recover an F-150 last week.

Roughly 14 miles south of Steamboat, the part of the river where the truck got stuck is accessed by Routt County Road 18 in an area where National Forest, BLM and state-managed land converge.

While the original call came in for a location believed to be in the Sarvis Creek Wilderness area, Lowe and Bond later determined the truck was actually on BLM managed land.

Whit Patterson, an outdoor recreation planner for the BLM’s Little Snake Field Office, said the agency was not aware of the incident, but he confirmed the section of the river where the truck got stuck is on BLM land.

“It’s really sad to see this because we just did a multi-million dollar habitat restoration project in the river in that reach two years ago,” he said in an email, adding that the agency would work with the Routt County Sheriff’s Office and CPW to address the incident.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said the agency was also unaware of the incident and noted the rules allowing vehicles to drive into rivers on National Forest land are situation specific, but generally, “vehicles need to remain on designated routes.”

If the truck had been on land managed by CPW, issuing any fines would depend on the circumstances of the event, according to Lowe. However, if the driver had been identified, “then we would have done some fines for at least operating a vehicle in the park where it shouldn’t be operated.”

Lowe said the damage to the river probably wasn’t “super severe.”

“There always is a risk of engine oil and stuff getting into the water, but as long as that truck is not leaking oil or something like that, it would displace some rocks, disturb a little bit of habitat, but probably more likely to cause damage to the riverbank,” Lowe said. “I don’t think that other than some limited damage on the shoreline where they went in and out, it didn’t look like there was a lot of major damage in the area that I could tell from where I was.”

Despite the relatively small impact from the incident, Lowe still advised people to keep their vehicles out of local bodies of water.

“Obviously, it is different if there is a marked trail or something, but no, we definitely do not want people driving in the rivers,”