From the looks of it, if you'd backed up to the spot where you stopped and got out to check the terrain, and gotten a bit more momentum, you likely would have made it.
But you do have to be careful the momentum doesn't cause you to bounce off course and get stuck.

 

That's kinda what I was trying to do, but trying to reverse up a hill on loose terrain doesn't work well. Then the front end started sliding down and I was screwed. Had to go down.

 

I used to drive my '81 Pontiac Firebird with an open diff up a muddy mountain road. Momentum was definately my friend. The tires were spinning at 70 mph while the car was moving about 8 mph. People at the top with 4x4 trucks couldn't believe it.

So, yeah, I concur that momentum is your friend. Sometimes it just gets you stuck really bad.

 

The thing is, what you had wasn't momentum or your fiend. You had wheel speed, and lots of it. Spinning tires a little in mud will sometimes keep you going forward, but often it will make you start going downward or just sideways. Spinning tires at 70 mph will never be better than spinning them at about 15 mph, but it does make a lot more noise so you can't tell what else is going on, doesn't let you back off the throttle very quickly if you need to, and it gives you a much better chance of tearing a large hole in your tire if there's a rock or stick in the mud.

Momentum is based on vehicle speed, not tire speed. It will either get you through a bad place and on to somewhere you can actually drive out of, or it will get you further into a bad place so you need to be pulled farther back to get out, or it will break you. So as was said several years ago when this thread was active, you need to be very careful with the use of momentum, but sometimes it's the right way to get through a short, not-too-bad spot.

 

I didn't realize this thread went back to 2014.

Yes, I had lots of wheel spin, but had I lifted off of the accelerator completely, the vehicle still would have moved forward, however slight. The vehicle would not have stopped instantly, that would defy physics. What I had was barely enough traction coupled with high wheel speed to overcome the mud and gravity. Have a good week my friend.

 

Experience (and a true-trac) go a long way