Events

The second annual Truck and Jeep Fest was held in July at the Canfield Fairgrounds in Ohio. Put on by 4 Wheel Parts and 4 Wheel Drive Hardware it provides families a chance to get away for the weekend and experience a wide range of fun and exciting activities. It offers something for everyone and some great deals on parts too...

The 4 Wheel Parts Canfield Truck and Jeep Fest last July was a premier event and we hope you enjoyed the coverage in the November issue. If you closed your eyes to snap pictures and fired off the camera aimlessly, you could hardly not catch a cool truck or happening. We shot so many interesting rigs that we decided to put some into a "Best-Of" collection...

Four times a year, the Big Dogs Off-Road Park hosts two and three day hard-core four wheeling events. Big Dogs is a 3,000 acre mountainous area in Gore, Virginia and offers 92 trails. These trails range from beginner and stock vehicle, to intermediate, advanced, and extreme trails...

The annual Camp Wamp group photo. Camp Nejedly originally was started by California Senator John A. Nejedly from District 7...

 Joseph Granatelli competes in Kart Jr II.   At 15, this will be his last year racing Kart. Maybe next year we'll see him behind the wheel of a Single Buggy...

Our quest to reach Venezuela’s Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world, continues. In Part II we had to turn our Jeep YJ and Toyota FJ80 back due to mud, flat tires and being too wide for the track. We’d left the rigs at an airstrip in the frontier town of La Paragua and chartered a Cessna 206 to fly us to a remote grass strip in the middle of nowhere...

The pilot set his plane down atop Auyan-tepui in 1937, he was looking to find gold, not to have his name immortalized forever by a waterfall. Angel, a former WW1 fighter pilot turned Barnstormer, with Charles Lindbergh’s Flying Circus, turned hard-drinking adventurer, had found gold 13 years before atop a tepui somewhere in the jungles of southeastern Venezuela. The problem was, he could never find the mountain again, though he spent the rest of his life trying...

When we left off last month, Photojournalist Chris Collard had floated off at midnight with several shady characters in a curiara (dugout canoe) in search of crocodiles, while I tried out sleeping in a hammock under the roof of a churuata (wall-less sleeping hut) to the sound of scurrying scorpions. To know what the heck we’re doing here, you really gotta read last month’s Part I. Meanwhile, here in Part II, our trip to Angel Falls, the world’s highest waterfall, continues...

Australia has countless miles of dirt roads, some close to civilization and, of course, tons of them in the remotest of wilderness. The government has been talking about paving them all over the years. We hope this never happens as it would take a lot of the adventure away from Down Under...

We had left the vast, remote lands of the west and centre behind us; upon reaching the east coast, we would travel through the most populated areas of Australia. More than two thirds of the country's twenty million people live along the eastern shoreline. It's a huge country, though, and we still had plenty of wilderness to explore...

Cresting the hill at the entrance to the 15,000 acre Paragon Adventure Park in Hazelton, PA, you peer over the lush-green valley ahead and it becomes apparent why the Mid-Atlantic Early Broncos club has held its "East Coast Bronco Roundup" here for four years running, including their 7th annual event in June 2005. One look over the parking area is proof of this event's popularity as dozens of 1966-1977 Broncos make their way to the staging area. Rigs range from modified to super modified, some requiring a trailer to arrive for this event...

AS THE WINTER MONTHS SEEM TO STRETCH ETERNALLY WITH GRAY SKIES AND RAIN, we automotive writers find ourselves spending too much time in front of our computer, and not enough time out on the trail. We call it editorialitis, and we usually don't realize we are afflicted until we notice a tire long-flat and thick layer of dust on the steering wheel of our favorite wheeling rig (which was put away clean). That's when we know we need to get out of town...

As the 2007 Easter Jeep Safari (EJS) rolled around this year, we decided to add something different. In addition to our usual hitting the trails with you, our readers, we decided to sponsor our own run, the inaugural Off-Road Adventures Moab trail ride. For this first year we decided to make it an invitational event for our partnering companies...

Moab is perhaps the number one destination for 4x4'ers. It is said that everyone should make the Pilgrimage to Moab at least once in their four wheeling lifetime. For many the time to do this is at the annual Easter Jeep Safari put on by the Red Rock 4 Wheelers...

We began our 1000-mile joy ride in the same location as the 1967 Mexican 1000 opening ceremonies; Tijuana's bull fighting arena. Known by locals as La Frontera, the land beyond Baja California's tourist zone is more than the desolate wasteland one might imagine from the window of a jumbo jet. It is a wild yet inviting place of remote pueblos, centuries old Jesuit missions, rustic cantinas and some of Mexico's most historic hotels...

You couldn't have asked for a more dramatic finish to the Championship Off Road Racing season: heroic competition, a beautiful girl in distress, and going out in a blaze of flame. The old expression about "the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat" hardly does justice to this exhilarating form of off-road racing. Before cutting to the hard action, let's set the stage, looking at the CORR season overall...

Ron Maximoff, a retired combat, commercial, and aerobatic pilot, competes professionally in off-road competitions all over the country. In 2004, Ron racked up enough points to compete in the Super Crawl at St. James, Utah...

WITH JOHN SUTTER'S 1849 discovery of gold in the small settlement of Coloma, thousands of young men packed up all of their worldly belongings into rucksacks, saddled up a horse, and headed west to California. Quick on their lead were countless wagon trains, strung out across a thousand miles of the Great Plains, and carrying adventurous families seeking a better life. Resembling a flooding tide, gold fever swept the west with incredible speed...

SPECIALTY EQUIPMENT MARKET ASSOCIATION (SEMA) holds a little get-together each fall at the Convention Center in Las Vegas. With 100,000 in attendance it's hard to believe that it's not open to the general public. In fact, SEMA gets pretty stingy with credentials to make sure there is room in the display isles for industry leaders from over 100 countries...

In the past, we have featured a couple of stories on Greg Adler, CEO and President of 4 Wheel Parts (TransAmerican Auto Parts) and his CORR and SCORE racing efforts. Here's another member of the "TAP family" and her first person account of her off-roading passion, rock crawling. Showing again we don't just "talk the talk," we "walk the walk" too...

THE IDEAstarted months before the competition took place. Could a few show truck boys from a 4 Wheel Parts store compete with some of the best custom 4WD fabricators in the Midwest? We were unsure since none of us had any previous competition experience. Once there, the intimidation factor grew as the competition, custom tube buggies and drivers with years of competition experience...

 If you watch True Grit, you'll notice Chimney Rock above Owl Creek Pass behind John Wayne when he "takes the reins in his teeth and fills his hands with iron. " You'll also see Chimney Rock in John Wayne's Cow Boys.     My wife, Barbara hates waiting hours for off-road adventurers to winch through a mud bog, get the group up a challenging hill, or rebuild a broken rig...

BEHIND EVERY OPEN 4X4 TRAIL IS A GOOD 4X4 CLUB. Yeah, that’s an obvious ripoff of a very old and familiar saying. ...

THE RUBICON is unquestionably the most celebrated four-wheel drive trail on the planet. Like a place of holy worship, the Rubicon has become the focal point for many a pilgrimage, mindful providence for not only the seasoned gearhead, but for anyone who's ever shifted a transfer case into 4WD. It has been the trail by which all other trails have been measured, the barometer of the four-wheeling difficulty scale...

LIKE A KID IN A CANDY STORE. That's just about any motorhead at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show. And like a kid in a candy store, you have to make some decisions...

EVERY YEAR, the automotive aftermarket holds a trade-only show just after Halloween that's both a trick and a treat. Hosted by SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association), it fills up all the available convention acreage in Las Vegas with every conceivable component and vehicle you can imagine. That's the treat...

POWER SLOT Here's some "braking news" Power Slot is now a division of Centric Parts, a leading North American supplier of replacement brake parts and hydraulics for cars, trucks and SUVs. So whatever type of vehicle you drive, Power Slot likely has a brake rotor for your vehicle with over 1200 different fitments available. For those of you who need big brake kits for full-size trucks and SUVs, two new lines were recently introduced: the Power Slot Cryo and Power Slot Plus...

Here's another installment of some new or improved products that caught our eye while we explored the vast array of exhibits that made up the 2007 SEMA Show. FABTECH Fabtech's Tundra 6" Performance lift system features extended length steering knuckles to operate within factory steering geometry. Relocated factory lower control arms with high arched 1/4" steel cross members and integrated differential skid plate offer protection...

IF YOU ARE LIKE US, there are certain events that trigger an irresistible urge to take action, somewhere, Winter Fun is all about the fun! Seemingly impervious to cold climes and frosty hands, the kids had more fun than anyone, slipping and sliding down a fresh coating of the frosty white stuff. somehow. The smell of pizza might necessitate an immediate call to Domino's, or the sound of mud terrains howling down the road might send you home to wrench on your rig: spontaneous and uncontrollable, these urges are knee-jerk reactions...

From Silverton, a flat and limitless desert stretched as far as the eye could see. This was Mundi Mundi, a place where one could actually see the curvature of the earth. G'day mate...

One of our favorite rigs in the corral was the 100 Series Land Cruiser. Besides the plush interior and luxurious Simpson II rooftop tent, in the back was an ARB Fridge/Freezer for our cold stubbies, a Long Ranger 120ltr fuel/55ltr water combination tank, a sun awning and the normal array of ARB lockers, suspension, bull bars and rear bumper and Safari Snorkel to keep the engine happy. Golden rays of light skipped over the red sands of the Simpson Desert, dispersing long shadows in its wake, alerting us of a new dawn...

THE 4 WHEEL PARTS TRUCK FEST has become a familiar favorite for 4x4 enthusiasts around the country wanting to get up close and personal with the movers and shakers in the aftermarket. Until the July 28-29, 2007 Truck & Jeep Fest at Canfield, Ohio, previous Fests had been inside events with static displays. The Canfield event became the automotive equivalent of a movie director shouting "action...

Deep in the rural back roads of South Carolina is a privately owned technical off-road park called Gulches. Situated in the hilly piedmont region of the Blue Ridge Mountains and at just under 80 acres, this ORV park not only meets the challenges of built 4x4's, it also accommodates dirt bikes and quads. Located in Laurens County, the region is steeped in American history going back to the American Revolution...