The foresters I've worked with over the years (who have 4 wheel drive vehicles and special mud tires, special suspensions, etc.) spend a goodly amount of time as part of their job driving on forested off-road trails and though rugged terrain. They laugh at themselves at how often they get practically irretrievably stuck (I mean bottoming out and then some) in the middle of the wild. They say that the better suited off-road vehicles with the more experienced off-road drivers, including themselves, get stuck in these off-road areas as often as ordinary vehicles with ordinary drivers — it's just that the ATV or 4-wheel drive vehicle occupants have a longer walk out than the ordinary vehicle occupants.

In the past I've come across quick-sand areas, where there was no way to tell it was quick-sand or gumbo. The surface in those areas seems solid, but if you leave your vehicle or tractor overnight on what you think is solid ground, when you come back in the morning, the vehicle will have disappeared.

On one project we had a "drag line" that was completely lost in a quick sand area - it was never recovered. A major effort was made by the underwriter to retrieve it but to no avail. Other heavy equipment was also lost in the recovery attempt. Coincidently, about 20 years later I was involved in a 3-D seismic shoot of the same area. I have the processed data and thought some day I’ll check to see where the drag-line (and the wagonload of gold they were searching for) is now.

Speaking of getting stuck, there's a military training base (a permanent Fort) where part of my job was to work with the Fort to identify hazardous areas in regard to third party oil & gas exploration. I was amazed to find notations at engineering and through interviews that a number of "tanks" got stuck 60 or 70 years ago so deep (subsurface) in the middle of dirt roads that it was then determined that the cost to recover them was greater than the value of the tank. So the army just covered them over with dirt and otherwise forgot about them. Many of those buried tanks are still located under these reservation dirt roads, exactly where abandoned - but driving on these roads today, you'd never know you were driving over tanks.