You’ll never see us: Towing trucks on one of North America’s most dangerous interstates
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SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — A police scanner crackles, voices chirp over the walkie-talkie and a laptop pings with road condition notices inside Charlie Stubblefield’s truck.
“It’s going to be a busy day,” said Stubblefield, as he navigated through packed traffic on I-70 against a backdrop of ambulance sirens on a busy President’s Day.
The wind howled and a snowstorm approached as Stubblefield, 39, raced to an 11-car pile-up that stalled traffic on a busy ski weekend.
Originally from Wisconsin, Stubblefield has been towing along the 90-mile stretch of I-70 from Denver to Vail Pass for the past five years.
Video: Peter Vo, Rocky Mountain PBS
“I noticed a big influx of vehicles, always on the side of the road in Colorado, on I-70, on those mountain passes, and they were broken down,” Stubblefield said when he first arrived moved to Colorado. “They were there for hours and hours.”
The 90-mile stretch of I-70 from Denver to Vail Pass is one of the most challenging roads to drive on in North America because of its steep grades — up to 7% — and severe weather conditions.
From October 2023 to April 2024, there were 293 reported passenger vehicle crashes on the I-70 mountain corridor.
Stubblefield started towing in 2019 by driving around to random breakdowns and asked the people stranded on the side of the road how he could help.
“I had a pickup truck. I had emergency warning lights on my pickup truck because I was a firefighter, and I thought, I'm just going to start driving around and seeing what's going on,” Stubblefield said.
At first, Stubblefield encountered drivers stranded with small issues such as tire changes and low coolant levels. Stubblefield isn’t a mechanic but calls himself “mechanically adept” so he learned how to quickly solve people’s problems.
Stubblefield continued to work out of his truck, sleeping in it many nights during storms so that’ would be the first on the scene to help cars that were spun out or broken down. He even eventually started to tow semis during rough weather with his one-ton diesel pickup truck.
In October 2019, the Vail Police Department got his contact during a snowstorm and asked if he could help chain up tires for semi-trucks. On the way there, he watched YouTube videos on how to chain trucks.
By the time he got there, he was chaining up semis for the rest of the night.
Stubblefield quickly poured his time into emergency roadside assistance and started patrolling the I-70 corridor for work.
“The demand was out there on the road for a company that was hungry, that wanted to serve the people out here that travel on this road, whether that's heavy-duty truck traffic or if it's light-duty truck traffic,” Stubblefield said.
Collaborating with his competitors, Stubblefield agreed to chain up semis after tow operators got the vehicles out of the bad weather conditions or steep grades.
“It’s probably for the best,” Stubblefield said, “to tow trucks with tow trucks rather than a pickup truck.”
As his business ramped up he hired fellow tow operators he was already working with and started to grow Mountain Recovery. He also finally put down $80,000 on a heavy-duty tow truck.
Today, Mountain Recovery has 25 employees and 19 vehicles.
The team works nonstop during snowstorms, responding to calls across I-70.
On President’s Day, Stubblefield and his team members responded to an 11-vehicle collision on I-70. The crash involved a horse trailer that was transporting bighorn sheep, a cow and a horse.
The crash closed all westbound lanes on I-70 during the already-growing snowstorm.
“It’s the perfect storm — literally,” Stubblefield said as he drove towards the crash. “It’s a holiday, the busiest ski weekend of the year, truck traffic is back and now there’s this huge storm. It’s just crazy.”
At the scene, the Colorado State Patrol and Colorado Department of Transportation responders in neon green jackets managed traffic and emergency vehicles servicing the crash. EMS had priority, taking two people to the hospital for injuries. The livestock were unharmed.
“We work shoulder to shoulder with law enforcement, with fire, EMS and with CDOT. We’ve created this system,” Stubblefield said. “The mountains have called for a system where we're very much first responders to these incidents.”
Stubblefield previously served as a firefighter for 10 years in Wisconsin. Stubblefield says there are many situations in which he’s the first to arrive and has had to cut people out of vehicles and put out fires in the summer.
“When I first moved here, I missed the fire service horribly,” Stubblefield said. “My fire service itch is definitely scratched with this whole [towing] business.”
Colorado Department of Transportation contracts with Mountain Recovery, among others, to quickly clear the roadways. On President’s Day, Mountain Recovery waited for the Colorado State Patrol to give them the clear before entering the scene to clear the vehicles and debris.
“These are dedicated professionals who work in some of the worst case scenarios, some of the worst weather and dangerous scenarios,” said Austyn Dineen, I-70 mountain corridor communications manager.
“It's incredibly important that the roadways stay open and stay safe,” Dineen said.
For every hour that I-70 is closed, the State of Colorado loses roughly $2 million in revenue according to Shoshana Lew, Colorado Department of Transportation’s executive director.
In 2024,100 full roadway closures on I-70 lasted a total of roughly 161 hours, Dineen said.
“This is what it takes to get I-70 open: collaboration and everybody working together,” said Gilbert Ramos, a tow truck operator at Mountain Recovery.
Because of the scale of the pileup, Stubblefield called in other members of his crew including “Big John”, “Bad Grandpa” and “Danger Ramos”.
Although Mountain Recovery is still young, many of its members have been in this career for more than 15 years. Many have known one another before working at Mountain Recovery and have developed nicknames for each other through their relationships.
The team members have customized trucks with their nicknames printed on their vehicles. Stubblefield’s GMC truck has its name “Tank,” rather than his nickname, “The I-70 Hero.”
“I’ve sort of embraced the nickname. I didn’t come up with it, my competitors did,” Stubblefield said.
Stubblefield said that his team is like a family.
“To be able to be out there in a hammering snowstorm when we're super tired at 3 a.m., and it’s zero degrees, you have to have a group of people around you that lifts you up and has fun,” he said.
At the crash, Stubblefield set up a post and delegated. While one person towed a semi-truck, others worked on dislodging the horse trailer —lifting the trailer with a tow truck crane— that was stuck to the Ford F350 hauling the livestock.
The rest of the team started to clean the highway, using brooms to collect shattered glass, plastic and loose car parts.
The highway opened up again about three hours after the crash.
“What we do out here on the side of the road and the reason I started [Mountain Recovery] is to help people,” said Stubblefield.
“I just want my guys to go out there and help people. We're going to put our best foot forward first. And all of the rest of it, finance, the cool trucks, the fun work will come afterward if we put helping people first.”
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