Thanks everyone for an extremely useful site. I hold my breath every time I take the two miles of deeply rutted, deeply holed. extremely muddy, old logging right-of-way to my cabin. I don't want to put a winch on my XJ, preferring to borrow a come-along and my husky nephew. I do carry a shovel and a two-ton scissors jack which is great but I have to be able to get underneath which deep watery mudholes don't always allow. Once raised up, though, there's enough brush, branches, blow-downs and other woody material around to lay a corduroy road at right angles under the tires
So onwards to my question: is a higher-capacity bottle jack a worthwhile accessory or a higher-capacity scissors jack? Any updates to this advice?

 

Bottle jacks can be good. I've carried one for awhile. The tricky part is the small round jack pad on the top of them does not work well for lifting from the axle tubes. I'd recommend fabricating a small V-shaped adapter to slip over the top of the jack to help keep the jack under the axle.

Not much surface area under those jacks either. They can get sketchy if you don't have a good foundation under it. If you can swing it, a small floor jack works great (something like a 1.5 or 2 ton).

 

Not all bottle jacks have those little round pads, one of mine has rectangular top, about 3/4 x 2" with upturns on the short ends. Not as good as a V, but still pretty good.

Floor jacks really aren't very good on uneven surfaces (never mind in mud holes) & one of those small ones would use most of its travel reaching the axle on an XJ, so would provide little or no lift, at least, not without a substantial block of wood.