UNION — Alex Sealey is sort of like Santa Claus, except his sleigh weighs 5,300 pounds and is equipped not with runners but with tires taller than some first graders.

And he hands out only one gift.

Freedom.

Although to some of his clients it might feel more like escape.

Sealey, who lives in Union, owns Grande Ronde Offroad and Recovery. He celebrated the business’ first anniversary in January.

Sealey’s role as savior starts when a driver has that sinking sensation — quite literally, in many instances — that the rig is stuck.

The morass typically is snow or mud, and the site a mountain road — or off a road — in Northeastern Oregon. But regardless of the substance that has your vehicle in its unpleasant embrace, Sealey will try to show up and get you rolling again.

“Unofficially, I’ve been pulling people out for as long as I’ve had a driver’s license,” said Sealey, who’s 36 and lived in Joseph, Baker City and La Grande before settling in Union a dozen years ago. “I just like to help people out.”

He has had ample chances to do so, since four-wheeling in the mountains is one of the favorite pastimes for Sealey, his wife, Crystal, and their children — Alley, 13, Danik, 12, Gabriel, 10, and Amariah, 9.

Sealey, who has a full-time job driving a truck for a fuel company, said that until just a couple years ago he never considered turning his Good Samaritan hobby into a business.

Occasionally drivers would offer him a tip after he yanked them from their predicament, but he didn’t go searching for clients.

The incident that prompted him to start his company began as a typical extrication.

But then the owner of the vehicle sued him for allegedly damaging his bumper.

The bumper, Sealey said with a laugh, was in the same condition after he was done as it was before he started.

He said a judge dismissed the suit.

But the experience chastened Sealey.

He got to thinking not only about his potential financial liability, but also about partially offsetting some of the expenses, for gas and wear and tear on his Jeep Cherokee, that he accrues in helping stranded travelers.

The result was Grande Ronde Offroad and Recovery LLC.

“I’d rather have continued to do it for free,” Sealey said.

But now he has a business with liability insurance.

Sealey said he strives to keep his charges as low as possible.

He said he’s heard of companies with minimum charges of $1,000 to free vehicles stuck in the sand dunes on the Oregon Coast.

Sealey said the biggest bill from the 78 recoveries he did in 2022 was $800. And that involved three vehicles and about 13 hours of work.

Sealey said he has a one-hour minimum, at $150, with a fee of $120 per hour for additional hours. Typically, he said, the stuck vehicle is rolling again within an hour.

If he needs to call in a second rescue rig — that’s rarely necessary, he said — there’s an additional $100 charge.

He said he never turns down a job due to money.

“If I get sent out there, I’m pulling them out regardless,” Sealey said. “I’m not going to leave anyone. I have payment plans. I work with people really well.”

Since he started his business about 14 months ago, Sealey said he’s helped several people he and his family came across while they were out for a weekend drive, something he tries to do at least once a month.

In a few instances, he said, the people whose vehicles he pulled out were initially concerned, after seeing the business logo sticker on his Jeep, that they would be saddled with a bill.

His response was simple.

“I tell them, don’t worry about that,” he said. “We’re up here anyway.”

Although Sealey said Grande Ronde Offroad and Recovery “is the definition of a family-

run business,” he has a couple friends who help him occasionally.

Not an ordinary Jeep

Sealey’s primary vehicle is a 1991 Jeep Cherokee four-door.

It is, he concedes, not a common choice for negotiating deep snow. Most drivers prefer a lighter vehicle, such as a two-door Jeep, Sealey said.

“Lighter is better,” he said.

But his Cherokee, though hefty, also has ample room for the equipment, including an on-board air compressor and a complement of tools, that he might need to yank somebody’s rig free.

His Jeep has a 4.5-inch lift kit that creates room in the fenders for 37-inch-tall tires that elevate his front and rear differentials and frame and help him avoid getting high-centered.

Both differentials are fitted with “lockers” — devices that ensure both tires, front and rear, are driven by the engine no matter the amount of traction each tire has.

(In conventional, unlocked differentials, engine power goes to the tire with the least amount of traction; if one front tire, for instance, is off the ground, all the engine power diverts to that tire, causing it spin uselessly while the tire on the ground, receiving no power, is equally helpless.)

But it’s not just the height of the tires that’s vital, Sealey said.

The width matters a lot, too — and his Jeep’s tires are 14.5 inches wide (typical SUV tires are 10-12.5 inches wide).

The wider the tire, the more “flotation” it has, and the less likely it is to sink deeply into the snow.

The basic concept is the same as with snowshoes — a person walking with snowshoes doesn’t plunge nearly as far into the snow with each step as a person wearing only boots, because the snowshoes distribute the person’s weight over a much greater area.

Sealey enhances this trait with his tires by letting almost all the air out of them.

For driving on the highway, tires are typically inflated to at least 30 pounds per square inch, and in some cases to 40 psi or more.

But when Sealey is traveling in deep snow, he deflates his tires to 1 or 2 psi.

(Hence the air compressor to refill the tires when he returns to asphalt.)

As anyone who’s ever had a flat tire probably noticed, a deflated tire is much wider than one full of air. That’s a dangerous situation on pavement, of course, but in deep snow those wider footprints keep Sealey’s Jeep rolling.

Naturally his Jeep is also equipped with a winch.

Actually he has two Jeeps, both built to similar standards.

He said some of his customers are initially skeptical that a single Cherokee can get them out.

“I come bebopping up the road in the snow, and the person says, ‘that’s going to pull me out?’” Sealey said.

But almost always the Jeep is up to the task, he said.

One exception, and the condition that bedevils most mountain travelers, even including people with tracked vehicles, is “sugar snow.” After long periods of dry, cold weather, snow can have the consistency of sugar, making it all but impossible for tires — even wide, deflated tires — to get traction, Sealey said.

Turning a hobby into a welcome local business

Until a few years ago, Sealey said his experience in helping extricate stuck rigs was by happenstance. If he was out driving in the mountains and came across someone who was stuck, he’d use his pickup truck to pull them out if possible.

He was driven largely by empathy.

“I’ve been stuck a few times,” he said.

But then Sealey got interested in more extreme off-road driving, adding the Jeep to his personal fleet.

He also started a part-time business in his shop in 2020. Sealey installs lift kits, aftermarket bumpers, winches and other off-road accessories. He recently started selling wheels and tires.

The word got around, Sealey said, that he had both the ability, and the willingness, to help people who were stuck.

He started getting an occasional request by phone or social media.

But then the lawsuit happened.

Since he started his business in early January 2022, Sealey said most of his jobs come from one of three sources. Sealey said he also gets calls from local tow companies that aren’t equipped to help drivers stuck far up in the mountains.

The third source is the Union County Sheriff’s Office.

Nick Vora, who is the search and rescue coordinator for the sheriff’s office, as well as the emergency management director for Union County, said Sealey’s business has been a welcome option in situations that don’t require an emergency search and rescue operation, but for which a traditional tow truck, which mainly operates on maintained roads, isn’t suitable.

“He’s been a really good partner in that respect,” Vora said of Sealey. “There have been numerous instances when people wanted to get their rig out, and were willing to pay for it. Having Alex and his company available to us has prevented us from having to go on some nonemergency rescue missions.”

Vora said search and rescue crews are trained and equipped to rescue people, but not to extricate vehicles.

“We’re not insured or trained to rescue vehicles,” he said.

Preventing emergencies

Vora said search and rescue volunteers will always respond to calls when a person’s life could be in danger, as well as in cases when there’s no imminent risk but a delay could put a person in jeopardy.

“We will still respond to prevent it from becoming an emergency,” he said.

If, for instance, several people were stranded when their vehicle got stuck, but Sealey wasn’t available, Vora said he would send out a crew to ensure the people got home safely, even if they have to leave their rig.

But having Sealey respond in such cases is ideal, Vora said, because both the people and their vehicle are rescued, and the county doesn’t have to deploy a crew.

Sealey said drivers obviously prefer not to leave a stuck rig in the mountains all winter — and for good reason.

“A vehicle that stays up in the mountains all winter, it’s probably ruined,” he said.

The problem isn’t the weather, though.

It’s vermin.

To mice and rats, a stuck truck or SUV is the equivalent of a luxury hotel.

“Nine times out of 10 you end up with rodents,” Sealey said. “I’ve seen the entire interior chewed up, and the wiring. The vehicle is essentially totaled.”

Sealey pointed out that stuck vehicles can also pose a hazard to snowmobilers and other travelers — especially if the vehicle is covered with a few feet of snow.

Sealey said that although most of his jobs are in Union County, he has always taken calls in Wallowa, Baker and Grant counties.

Baker County Sheriff Travis Ash said he hasn’t spoken with Sealey.

But like Vora, Ash said Baker County’s search and rescue crews’ primary responsibility is to save lives.

“We will always rescue people, and then it’s up to those folks to reach out to tow companies to have their vehicle removed,” Ash said. “We can help facilitate reaching out to tow company’s at the responsible party’s request, but they are able to choose which company they prefer.”

Vora said in cases when, say, a vehicle has slid off a highway, Union County rotates such requests among all local tow companies.

But when it comes to vehicles stuck in snow or mud miles from the pavement, Sealey’s company is the only current option, Vora said.

The perils of expecting too much from all-wheel drive

Sealey said that although he’s done quite a few rescues in winter, his busiest season is spring.

As snow begins to melt at lower elevations, he said, people are “itching to get up in the woods.”

Some of them end up getting mired while trying to drive through a lingering snowdrift. Others get stuck in the mud that is a sort of transition between winter snow and summer dust.

“Snow’s deceptive,” Sealey said. “You can’t always tell how deep it is. There could be a six-foot ditch beneath that snow.”

Although he said there are cases in which a driver made an obviously foolhardy decision, Sealey said by far the more common problem is that drivers believe their all-wheel drive cars — small crossover SUVs, which have become far more popular than sedans — are more capable than they are.

“There’s a false sense of security,” he said. “People thinking, ‘I’ve got all-wheel drive, I can go anywhere.’”

Those rescues tend to be relatively straightforward, he said, since the vehicle, often as not, has traversed terrain that poses no challenge to his modified Jeep.

But there are exceptions.

In one of the few jobs when Sealey needed both his Jeeps, someone driving a one-ton diesel pickup truck with dual rear wheels — about as heavy as a passenger vehicle gets — got stuck in mud last spring near Spring Creek between La Grande and Meacham.

Except it wasn’t just the pickup. The rig was also towing a three-axle toy hauler camp trailer.

“About 26,000 pounds of anchor,” Sealey says with a laugh.

Although Sealey has traveled throughout the region for rescues, one place he’s returned to repeatedly is the Summit Road to Mount Emily, which branches off Interstate 84 near Meacham.

Sealey said he’s freed several vehicles along that road whose drivers were led by their navigation systems to a restroom. Trouble is, the road isn’t plowed as far as the restroom.

“They make it about 500 yards down the road,” he said.

“Unofficially, I’ve been pulling people out for as long as I’ve had a driver’s license. I just like to help people out.”

— Alex Sealey, Union, owner of Grande Ronde Offroad and Recovery