Red Rock OHV Conservation Crew recovers wrecked sports car

A group of volunteers from the Red Rock OHV Conservation Crew and Arizona 4×4 Offroad Recovery have successfully recovered a wrecked Nissan Z from Oak Creek Canyon below the Schnebly Hill overlook an estimated 32 years after it plunged down the cliff.

The project began several weeks ago, when volunteers scouted the car’s location and began rigging it for the ride back up the hill. On Thursday, Aug. 3, they were able to move it about halfway up the side of the cliff, and they finished the lift on Monday, Aug. 7.

“We’re working on about a 50-degree slope,” Nena Barlow of Barlow Adventures, who is coordinating the recovery for RROCC, said, adding that the car was about 280 feet below the road, measured vertically. “It’s got one bent wheel left on it, so we’re wrapping the rig with chains and just dragging up a carcass of a car.”

The RROCC volunteers used a boom truck — in combination with two truck winches that took over when the boom truck’s winch failed on Thursday — to provide the main lift for the recovery. They also built a jig hoist to lift the nose of the car over boulders and used an additional portable winch to steer it around larger obstacles.

“We did consider a helicopter lift for this particular job,” Barlow said. “The cost would have been approximately $10,000, not including our efforts on the ground to set up the lift.” Curb weight for the first-generation Nissan Z was between 2,100 and 2,700 pounds.

Those assisting with the recovery included RROCC volunteers and members Brian Carstens of Sedona ATV, Dan Candler of Outback ATV, Larry Parker, Chad DeAlva and Ryan Gaertner; Carl Girard, Jason Pfeiffer, David Carter and Anthony Hanson of Arizona 4×4 Offroad Recovery; and Dondi West of Yavapai County Search and Rescue.

How Did It Get There?

While the Z had a notorious local history and was formerly a landmark pointed out by tour guides, its story may turn out to be somewhat different from what Sedonans always thought.

“Back in the ’90s, Schnebly Hill Road was still a pretty smooth graded road,” Barlow said. “It was a shortcut that locals would use to get to Flagstaff because it was still so well-maintained and it was kind of a high school kids’ party spot up on top of Schnebly Hill Road, up on the vista up there. This was a high school party. These girls, twin sisters, left the party and missed the turn to start down the switchbacks and went off the edge. They both lived, miraculously. One of them was paralyzed, unfortunately, but the other one was OK.

“When you look at how far they went, it’s amazing that the car is as intact as it is and that they lived.”

The accident took place on June 26, 1991. The two girls involved were Brittney and Samantha Nigh, then 18, daughters of Coconino County Deputy Sheriff Bill Nigh, driver Michael Willier and Arlene Hernandez, then 15.

Willier was later charged with aggravated assault for his role in the accident.

However, reports at the time identified the car involved as a 1970 four-door Cadillac sedan and said that the car had left Schnebly Hill Road shortly after the point where the pavement ends. It is unclear whether the make and model of the car were incorrectly recorded at the time or whether the story gradually became attached to a different wreck over the course of three decades.

A Growing Problem

The Nissan Z was the first of a number of vehicles, including three in the Fossil Springs area, that RROCC is planning to remove.

“The last couple years, it’s become a significant problem, with people abandoning cars in the forest, or having an accident and leaving the wreck wherever it was, but also RVs, people basically storing RVs in the forest,” Barlow said. “A lot of our public lands — we see this on the BLM land too — have had to implement existing restrictions they have for how long you can leave your vehicle in the forest to keep these vehicles from piling up out there. It’s been an interesting couple of years.”

While the Cononino National Forest did not provide equipment or crew for the recovery, rangers were present in a supervisory capacity.

The USFS is also providing RROCC with the locations of abandoned vehicles.

“The easy stuff that regular tow trucks can get to, they call those jobs in,” Barlow explained. “We just get called in for the really gnarly off-road access or stuff like this that’s way down in the canyon … There were 12 [cars] on the list that were questionable by the Forest Service as to whether tow trucks could get them. A couple of them got removed by tow trucks. One of them got washed away in all the flooding that we had this winter, so that one might turn up back on our list at some point, but right now it’s not where it was last fall. We have like eight on our list at the moment.”

“As of right now, this is a volunteer project,” Barlow said. “But because of the extent of this project and some of the others — this is the oldest and probably one of the, if not the, most technical — we are looking at a grant through Arizona State Parks.

“There’s a significant amount of OHV money collected every year to use exactly for projects like this cleanup project, to give back and put back into our public lands.”