Hello! Welcome to extreme4x4.com! While this site has been around for many years, it's been dormant for a while. When Brad Lark gave me a call and told me the plans he had, I jumped at the chance to work here.
So, who am I? I've been four-wheeling for thirty years, exploring places that very few get to see (unless they, too, are driving 4x4's). I was Editor of 4-Wheel Drive & Sport Utility Magazine for most of the 1990's. That was a great experience and I got to meet and know many of the great people who make up the four-wheeling world.
Being from Southern California, I can hardly spell m-u-d, but I do like rocks and sand. Extreme four-wheeling has been my passion for quite a few years, starting a couple of decades ago when I joined the Sareea Al Jamel (Fast Camel) 4WD club. The Fast Camels were based in Indio, California, smack in the middle of the Colorado/Sonoran desert. Starting right after WWII, club members had been out in the desert exploring old roads and trails, turning them into what we used to call "jeep trails." Notice the small "j" in jeep. Chrysler gets mad if we say or write the word jeep with a capital "J," as J**p is a registered trademark. Go figure. Anyway, after a few years, the Fast Camels started the "Fast Camel Cruise," a run that became famous for many years among 4x4 aficionados. It was quite extreme for those days, although today, the trails used are intermediate to advanced, but not extreme. The Fast Camel Cruise finally became a casualty of the California Desert Protection Act, which closed over seven MILLION acres of desert to public access.
After my time with the Fast Camels, I discovered, along with a lot of other four-wheelers, what fun it | could be to really hang it out and challenge our vehicles and ourselves. Luckily for us, the Victor Valley 4-Wheelers started building the first of what was to become many extreme trails in Johnson Valley, which is only a few minutes from my home in Yucca Valley, California. Other clubs around North America followed suit and we now have quite a few extreme trails that dedicated four-wheelers can attempt and dedicated sites like extreme4x4.com can report on. I've owned many 4x4's. My current vehicle is a 1991 Toyota regular cab short bed pickup. It sports many modifications by All Pro Off Road and Marlin Crawler, 5.29 gears and Detroit Lockers front and rear. It also sports custom Alcan leaf springs front and rear (the IFS was cut off and disposed of) that allow clearance for 36x12.50-16 Super Swamper TSL SX tires. The bed is bobbed 12", which helps tremendously on extreme trails.
We plan coverage of extreme four-wheeling around the country, as well as tech articles that apply to the sport. While it hasn't been decided yet, we might even have a section dedicated to those trails, 4x4's and drivers "bubbling under" the extreme designation, yet still interesting to four-wheelers everywhere.
E-mail us at info@extreme4x4.com and let us know what you'd like to see. I'm excited that I can work with other dedicated four-wheelers here at extreme4x4.com and I know that we'll become one of the most popular four-wheeling sites on the World Wide Web very quickly!
Thanks for visiting extreme4x4.com. Come back often! I also hope to meet you on the trail somewhere. If you drive something interesting, maybe you'll even let us run a feature on it . . . |
