A GMC Yukon is smashed against giant boulders in a ravine off U.S. Highway 14-16-20 between Cody and Greybull. It’s been there for two years and could be there for many years longer.
On June 8, 2024, Suzanne Marie Cole drove the 7,000-pound SUV off the highway in what she claimed was a carjacking. She was arrested on two misdemeanor charges of probation violation, as it was determined she was intoxicated at the time of the accident.
Cole’s case has long since been resolved, but her Yukon is still where she left it. Its windows and windshield are gone, anything of value inside is long gone, and it's riddled with bullet holes.
Pere Davison saw the Yukon while hiking in the Oregon Basin this past week.
“I hike up along that ridge all the time, but I have to go down and look over an edge to see the car,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “It is hard to believe it got down to where it stopped. It had to go over some pretty big boulders.”
The Yukon is likely to become one of dozens, possibly hundreds, of vehicles left abandoned in remote, hard-to-reach areas in Wyoming. It’s just not worth the effort to recover it.
A Fruitless Effort
Zac Beardall of Zac's Towing and Recovery in Cody knows exactly where the Yukon is. After Cole’s accident, the Park County Sheriff’s Office contacted him about recovering it.
Beardall isn’t one to be intimidated by a challenging recovery. He knows he could recover the Yukon, but as a business owner practicality takes precedence.
“There's no reason for it other than it's basically a fruitless effort,” he said. “Trying to devote an entire day and an entire fleet of equipment to a non-paying job is not exactly the best business decision.”
In these incidents, the owner is usually responsible for recovery costs. According to Beardall, that wasn’t an option for Cole.
“The owner didn't really make that choice,” he said. “It's more that they had no other option because they didn’t have the money or insurance to cover the operation as it stands. It’s not like breaking down on 1000 Wyoming Street and getting towed for $100.”
Because the State of Wyoming doesn’t cover recovery expenses, Beardall would have to cover it himself. It wasn’t worth it then, and it’s even less so now.
“That Yukon will never be roadworthy again,” he said. “It launched off a cliff and bounced up three boulders. The very second it lost momentum at the bottom of that cliff, it was never going to be roadworthy again.”
Two years later, the Yukon is in ever worse condition. It’s full of holes, created by rust and dozens of bullets, indicating it’s been used for target practice more than once.
When Beardall’s on the hook for a difficult recovery, he can recoup some of the cost by scrapping the vehicle. Even then, recovering the Yukon wouldn’t be worth it.
“The recovery’s not worth the scrap value,” he said. “Even the best scrap value on it wasn't ever going to be worth the recovery effort.”
(Zac Beardall) 
(Zac Beardall) 
(Zac Beardall) 
(Zac Beardall)
Live And Let Live
Given the Yukon’s location, it’s under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The agency might decide that recovering the vehicle is worth the expense.
But will it? Beardall thinks it’s unlikely, especially because it’s not doing any harm where it is.
“For the BLM, it falls under the same purview as trash and litter,” he said. “It's not hurting anything where it's at. It's not obstructing a roadway or hiking path, and it’s not causing some huge environmental friction. Nobody’s going to pay a huge amount of money to get a vehicle out when it’s not doing anything.”
That’s what Beardall described as something that’s “been the establishment” since the invention of motorized vehicles. Sometimes, they end up where they shouldn’t be and remain there.
“They're big chunks of steel that take a lot of effort to move,” he said. “Sometimes, they’re in an area where it’s not really worth trying to move them, so we leave them.”
That’s nothing new. Beardall knows of “about 50 different vehicles in the area” that ended up in similar predicaments and haven’t moved or been recovered since. Many of those are older than one might expect.
“I can take you out to places where there's Model A’s in canals,” he said. “They’ve been there since they went there, and nobody's moved them in the last 100 years.”
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Unless the BLM decides to pay Zac’s Towing and Recovery or some other company to get the Yukon out of the ravine, Beardall expects that it’ll stay where it is. It’s so far away from U.S. Highway 14-16-20 that it can’t even be seen from the road.
There was only one scenario where Beardall might find the Yukon worth the time, effort, and expense. That would require more social media savvy.
“I could be like some of the YouTube guys and publicize the effort to make money off it,” he said. “Maybe one day I'll have a YouTube channel set up, where we're getting paid for views recovering vehicles from canyons and sinkholes, but that’s the only way it would make any sense, financially.”
If that ever happens, Beardall doesn’t anticipate becoming a social media star anytime soon. Business is busy enough without the extra clout.
“At this time of year, especially, we're ‘all hands on deck’ trying to operate and pick up cars, motorists, and anybody else who might be stranded, broken down, or wrecked,” he said. “Taking a full day to recover that Yukon just isn’t worth it.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
