Careful When Loading on your Trailer

I learned something slightly painful recently. We were out for a great ride, safe for getting soaked by an unexpected rain squall. On returning to the truck, I failed to take into account that the loading ramps were wet from the rain and the tires were muddy, making them slick. Headed up the ramps in2WD instead of AWD and when the front tires hit the trailer deck, the rear tires unloaded their weight and began spinning. The RZR started sliding rearward and slid off the ramps. Nothing serious, though and the ramps were reset, the RZR put into AWD and up I went. On tying it down to the trailer, I discovered that during the short fall to the ground, the front end plastic lower grill had hit something sharp that cut the plastic. I suppose it's not a very expensive part to replace, but it looks bad, just the same and my pride was wounded. The other thing I noticed was that one of the ramps was slightly bent. Not much, but it's still perfectly usable.

I guess the moral of the story is, never take anything for granted. Those knobby tires offer little traction against wet, slippery, muddy steel and using AWD is a good policy when loading onto the trailer, every time, wet or dry.

Sigh, why does it always seem to take something like that to wise us up? I hope this will help save someone else from a similar experience. It could have been more serious than it was. I was lucky, I guess.