First of all, you should all know that I am ultra-safety-conscious. Goggles all the time, kevlar chaps when cutting, hearing protection, never move across side-hills on the tractor, never reach down toward a moving driveshaft, etc. etc. But here are my responses to some of the questions you all pose:
1. I will not be getting tractor tires as I do a lot of mowing and it would tear up my turf. I do about 80% mowing and only 20% cleaning up/lifting/etc. I do no traditional farming.
2. I have liquid ballast tires which, of course, only do so much. I typically put my Jinma
chipper on the 3-pt if I'm going to lift anything substantial. However, in this case I had no plans to lift anything at all and my mistake was deciding to "push" the stump with my forks under the stump without realizing that the downgrade would require me to LOWER the forks as I moved forward the 3 feet I planned on pushing it. I was only intending to push it 3 feet forward so that I could get the tractor out of the hole and then turn.
3. I had the tractor in the middle gear. If I was lifting and moving with heavy loads up hill etc. I would put it in low gear. The tractor easily got up to 35 mph going downhill in middle gear, which tells you how freaking out of control things got on the way down.
4. I had my seat belt on, which would have saved me if I rolled, but also stopped me from jumping, which was one of the thoughts that shot through my mind. But I felt the belt tug when I briefly tried to lift up.
5. The pasture is surrounded by moderately thick woods, with some massive Virginia oak and other trees that, if I had not stopped after hitting all the fence posts, I probably would have collided with. If I made it through the fence and through the 30 feet of woods, there is a lower road and then 15 foot drop off that I would have plummeted down.
6. After getting the stump off the forks and doing the underpants check, I put the tractor away and non-chalantly walked to the front of the property where my wife was with my daughters. I did not, and will not, mention a word of it to my wife. If I did, I would likely have to argue about why I can't just pay somebody to come clear pasture!
7. Also, a couple people have indicated that I should have put a heavy attachment on so that my back tires would have had traction. However, if you read the story, you will see that in order to get through the hole, I had to take the attachment off the back, as it would have disallowed me to fit through both width and depth wise. No matter what attachment I would have had on, it would have had to be removed to get out of the hole. It would either hang on the sides or dig into the ground as the back tires went down into the hole. So, I had to take the attachment off. When I came up on the other side, I planned to push forward the stump, NOT lift it. I was planning on doing no lifting whatsoever that day. But the downward grade effectively created lift.
Bottom line: the error was deciding to put the forks UNDER the stump and then move forward, not realizing that the nearly indetectable downward grade at that point created the less than one inch of lift needed to send me careening down the hill. In retrospect, I SHOULD have just gone and gotten the other tractor and pulled the JD out backwards. But, without thinking that far ahead, I should have at a minimum pushed the stump out of the way using the bottom or tips of the forks, NOT by sliding the forks underneath.
If you were in 4 wheel drive and low gear it probably wouldn't have happened. I learned this going down our drive with a bucket full of gravel. It can happen in a flash as you found out. Glad your ok.
