Page updated: 01/04/2004 10:22 PM

I figure it should be explored a little since in one way or another it seems to pop up every once in a while. I think making it means that your rig is set up to get over any trail you attempt. "Alone"  Having the right tools and parts to get yourself through. If your lucky enough to have buddies along to help you out when you get detained by an obstacle, well, so what! Is your objective to look cool and do better than your buds Or to get through a trail with the least amount of damage to your junk? Way back when, I had to build roads bridges and you name it to get my dumb ass out of a trail I should not have been on in the first place. I always got the job done though. Sometimes it would be one of those [get off the pavement 100 ft] and spend the weekend extracting the truck/car or whatever I happen to be driving at the time in time to get to work on Monday morning. To me, the truck is irrelevant in the equation. Your there to test your skills at survival on any trail. As always, it depends on the trail and what your driving, to get the job done as well as you can to get it done. If your driving a monster big rig way over built for the trail your on, well....naturally, your going to get the oohs! and aah's! from the peanut gallery.

Let's explore this a little farther. If your driving a one wheel drive Volvo and some monster jeep is on the same trail and handles all your difficulties with ease. Should you be feeling bad because your not flying over every obstacle like the monster jeep? Well hell no! Get his ass out on the freeway and see how he stacks up against your Volvo! I'd have to say that most people base their opinions on what others think and how well they look doing the trails. Personally, once I've left the BS back at the fire pit (no matter how many are running the trail with me) I forget the chit chat and it's me and that trail and that's it. When I step into my rig it's all up to me and the  jeep  to get us both to the other end of any given trail. No ego's and no comments from the boy's means anything to me. Well, until the fire pit re-appears and the BS begins all over again. Hahaha! Kids! But, back to the original discussion......

I've been stuck (detained) so many times in every truck I've ever owned that it's hard to remember all the times I've been knee deep in mud and using carpet to get through a soft sand wash in my work truck or whatever I had to drive at the time. Been stuck vertically in a 6 ft ditch and rolled off a 500 ft hill. I retrieved the rig myself every time.

However, the rig was never the issue with me back then. There weren't any comp expeditions going on and a built truck was what you drove to work and it rode like a semi with the air bags deflated! There were no Off Road tires so to speak back then. Keeping air "in" the tire was much more important than airing down. Ha-ha! I carried strips of carpet and plywood pieces to help build pathways and roads to the next valley or to get to the other side of a clearing. Why? Well, because that looked like the best camping spot, that's why! Or, just to see if I could do it. Was I in some kind of competition with people I was with. Not back then! Hell I didn't really know many peep's that didn't think I was some kind of nut case doing all the off road junk. Especially alone. Or at all for that matter. Actually, there was no such thing as off road. It was you and your rig having this strange urge to get to any particular spot on the mountain or in some big valley. You may only have been 100 yds off the paved road but you were king of that spot because nobody else had the gumsion to get there. You had a since of accomplishment. The people knowing what you were doing thought you were basically a nut case.

I'm not talking about back in King Arthur' days but, it was a totally a different time in the general  as far as so called wheeling goes. I mean what we think of as wheeling today was just a way to get to a favorite hunting/fishing spot or just plain getting to your front door in a storm when living on a muddy road.

Why would I go to all that trouble to get from point "A" to "B"? Because it was a challenge to see how far I could go with what I had. There weren't any big dammed tires and nobody thought of airing down and even if you did the crappy tires we had back then would disintegrate fast and simply come off the crappy rims. A Power wagon was really something to see out there. In those days it was a monster truck. Hell it still is IMO! Man how attitudes have changed towards wheeling.

I once got stuck in a wash 100 yds wide. Me and my truck, right smack dab in the middle. I tossed my usual sheet of plywood under the truck using the standard jack to get the tires up. Drop the truck down and step on the skinny peddle. The plywood was rather old and the two rear tires just dropped right through it. Now I had a real dilemma. Not only was I stuck, but I couldn't get to the reason I was stuck. Haha! The truck was 4" off the sand and the tires are stuck through the wood and I have to get all that crap outta there before the dammed truck moves another inch. Eventually, I dig down far enough (with my 32 oz framing hammer due to the fact I was famous for forgetting my shovel) and start tearing the ply apart a piece at a time until it was finally freed from the dastardly sand and ply combo stick.  ha-ha! Glad I ain't telling you some of the stupid chit I've done over the years. Yikes! It even makes me sweat just thinking about it. Ignorance is truly bliss I've discovered. anyways, you learn things the hard way sometimes. Like the time I was in that same wash as the one mentioned earlier at 2 am stuck as usual in a brand new truck. My brothers.....2 hours old....I get a trail for him to back up on with a few bush's & old plywood  pieces we found that some ding dong had left there  (I know! Don't even go there) and some fence posts and other trash we found and do the make shift road thing. So I tell him it's ok to back out. On the first attempt he looks like he's going to extract that shiny new truck on the first try. But, he has the door open and he's watching where he's going from an open door hanging out of the truck with most of his bodacious body. We had no safety belts back then but he didn't fall out . That time! Anyways, he's moving along pretty good. Beer cans flying out the back and carpet and junk flying all over the place! all the sudden his truck drops into a hole on the drivers side. Guess what happed to the open door? Ha-ha! Yep, it turned into a bat wing! Once we were out we discovered that you should keep the fricking doors shut when extracting your rig.

We both got on top of the door and with our combined weight to get it to shut. Doors back then were pretty hefty but so were we!! I guess doing all the things I did the hard way made me feel like the jeeps and equipment of today is sort of like cheating. I mean am I proud of myself because I got over some nasty assed rock piles at the hammers after spending a bundle to make my rig be capable of doing it? Hell no! I got the rig to do exactly what it was built to do. The big deal today is...can you run it without breaking some expensive parts. Back in the day (as Blair would say) we had a car/truck/whatever to get us to work and back and the tiniest dirt road in a snow storm was a freaking adventure to me. You needed to be real inventive at times to get a half mile off and back onto the road. Hell I used to take my 1954 Hudson Hornet with 4" of ground clearance up Sheep Head mountain all the way to the the lodge. (closed today) It took me a full day and sometimes that day would turn into 3/4 days because some swamp would suck me down in a virtual much rock bog. I felt like I really accomplished something when I got through it however. although using primitive tools etc, I usually got through anything I tackled.  It sure as hell was never meant to be an off road vehicle but hey! That's all I had so what the hell! You made do with what you had.

Today it is a completely different story of course. Off road tires, dry cell batteries that don't leak all over your paint job when your on your top or side. Huge lifts lockers super low gears duel tyrannies high lift jacks and snatchem straps. Under carriage protection, nerf bars, GPS units and Ham radios, bead locks, massive winches, super high tech injection systems etc. etc. etc.

So, what does a guy do with all this new equipment today. Well hells bells! ya got to find something that is a challenge of course. Big assed rocks and huge mud pits and high power V-8 engines with 40" tires cranking out mega HP, rock gardens galore. Is it more fun "than back when" heh heh! depends on your point of view I suppose. To me, "back when" it was much more of a challenge. You never knew what the hell was going to happen next. And there were times when you wondered if you would ever get your Ranchero or Buick or Hudson back on pavement. Even though you could see that dammed pavement from where you were stuck. hahaha! It was great and I loved every minute of it. Maybe that's one reason I love Mexico so much. You never know when you going to meet up with some major disaster like the roads washing out like at 30 ft depths and you have to cross the dammed river bed. Or it could be the two small rocks and a couple paper bags they put on the drop off with candles in them so your forewarned there's a drop off there. Like umm! That's one reason it isn't a good idea to travel at night down there.

There isn't a time when I don't run a trail and get that old feeling that "OH shit" we're going to get stuck in that bog or sand trap, getting that old feeling I used to get when that was a common happening.. Of course today, I drive a jeep that is virtually impossible to get stuck and stay stuck. Hell I plug in the MP3 and crack open a Corona and sit back and pretty much pay no attention to most of the trail these days. Pokey grinds his way through just about anything with my input. I don't get that old feeling of great accomplishment like I used to with ordinary cars/trucks with no mods. heh heh! The good old days. They sucked but I loved em anyways.

I suppose after many years of wheeling in one way or another on everything ever made to wheel with in the dirt I have come to the realization that it's the being there that counts, the friends, the fire pit, the easy going ribbing everybody gets for doing something stupid on the trail. The whole experience of just being out there riding along in your 4x4 creation (whatever it may be) is where it's at. I love the whole experience and seeing just what is over the next ridge. Providing you can make it over the next ridge that is.

Is there a difference in the guy that floats over the boulders and through the sand pit's with ease VS the guy that has to be yanked pulled winched high lifted and in general look like a goon in comparison to the big dogs? Hell yes, if he's squared away he's having ten times the fun of the so called big puppers. It's amazing to me that most of the time these guys spend the whole weekend apologizing for needing a strap etc. Hell your there to have fun and get that rig over the rock piles. Who the hell cares how you get the job done.

When I hear these so called big dogs comment on "that guy shouldn't even be here with that piece of crap" syndrome I lose a lot of respect for these guys when I hear that kind of junk talk. I mean, they built their rigs to go out and tear it up. Well great! But don't scam on the guys that aren't there yet. if you do, your a punk ass and I wouldn't wheel with you. I mean your out there to have a good time and everyone is at a different level in their rigs. If you want to build monster mega jeep and compare it to someone....go find someone that has an equally equipped jeep and get it on. Guarantee you won't see it happen much. Like most bullies when confronted with their own fears, they all the sudden need to be somewhere else.

There are trail where the newbs should probably not be on of course. I mean with rigs built just for those trails anyways. I've seen some under built rigs on some pretty precarious trails in some serious trouble. hahaha! I love it of course since my favorite time wheeling is when someone breaks and everybody stops to get the rig fixed. It really pisses some people of however. And you can't blame them in this instance because they built their rigs specifically for the trail and didn't come to baby sit. As always, there are exceptions..... Usually I tell these guys to go ahead on and we'll catch up later. Which we never do of course because we're usually there replacing a hub etc and they're back in camp complaining about how people come out there with ill equipped rigs and ruin their egotistical attitudes. Haha! hey! to each his own eh! Let em go. They are running the trail with a completely different outlook on why they're there IMO. They  miss the best part of the whole big pic if you ask me. If your living the wheeling experience you need to take it all in while your out there. I've seen guys haul ass out there. Drop the jeep of the trailer and hit the trails. Run them as fast as they can with camera in hand and pack it up and go home. Now WTf are they getting out of that? Are they there just look like the big dog double throw me down wheeler and missing out on all the other aspects of wheeling? I think so. Maybe they're out there to just wheel and get it over with I don't know. Could be they have crappy dispositions and don't like to fraternize. May be a tad bit of the short guy syndrome going on there eh! No offence to any short guys of course.  heh heh!

For me, it all starts in your noggin. You buy your dream rig and then take it out and see it isn't exactly up to snuff. You return home and start the never ending process of upgrades. Hopefully your doing this at a slow enough pace that your not making to many mistakes and costing yourself a needless amount of cash building something you thought you wanted but you went the wrong direction. heh heh! Not that I'd know anything about that. All those jeep parts on my shelf were ummm! Well lets skip that part! Everybody has an opinion on what you need to do to upgrade of course. And of course what they did on their rigs are absolutely the best way to go. And the mag's!! ha! Forget it! You see some monster mud runner on the front page and you live in the desert. I mean come-awn!

 There are two kinds of wheelers. The ones that roll them baby's on their sides and get the their first body damage. But, don't fix it when they get home. They continue to bash the rig putting their hard earned cash into the reliability of the rig for the next deep groove on the next trail. These guys are hard core who gives a hoot about body damage and as far as pure wheeling goes....probably have the most fun of any wheelers out there. They certainly are the most fun to watch in any case. All the guys I know like this don't do it to prove anything. They're just having a blast like they should be. There is a competition thing going on usually with these runs between friends, so that makes it even more fun to watch. You may notice I said "Watch" Ha-ha! I no longer have the desire to go home and spend a week repairing my rig by following one of these crash and bang it wheelers. I could build a rig to do such things but realized not to long ago I don't personally want to go out and rip my Jeep anymore. Not to mention my body. I've done my share of rollovers side swamping the big cracks and jumping tall buildings in a single bound. So, I'm particular as to where I stick old pokey when I'm out there.

Just remember like all things in life. There's always someone out there bigger and better than you or you. Be a dip shit and your sure to meet them one day. So, use your heads in both building your rigs and wheeling them. Try to remember when you get to the imaginary top of the pile what it was like when you started out. And treat the newbs with respect. The only difference between you and them is that you started a little sooner and already know what they need to know. Pass on your knowledge to them and watch then grow as wheelers. I know most wheelers do just that but once in a while you run into the elitists. Man do they suck for the sport and the whole wheeling image in general.


Part of the wheeling experience, the flora, the fauna and all your buddies and all the way kewl equipment rolled into a ball and sharing it all with your buddies is the best. Nothing like it. Again, and as usual, this is just the way I see it. I could be wrong and usually am.

Have fun and be safe out there.

PS...any Peeps that feel as though I was talking about them in this article, well, your probably right! As usual all names have been changed to protect the ignorant. I mean innocent!

 Bud Boren