Big Tires

Dirt Every Day FULL EPISODE | Stock Trucks vs. the Rubicon Trail!—Episode 83
20 odd years ago Marc & I drove his Isuzu Trooper to Reno Nevada to watch the air races. The unlimited class, which was all WW2 fighters, was the big draw. With the craze for safety that was sweeping the country we figured anything this dangerous was going to be banned any day now, so we decided we wanted to see one of these races before they disappeared completely. This was before that warbird last a trim tab and dove into the ground.

Marc had gotten into offroading and had made some minor modifications to his Trooper, and since we are driving all the way to Reno, we decided to tackle the Rubicon trail.

On the way down something happened that has stuck with me all this time. We were driving down highway 58 southeast from Eugene to highway 97. It was late and just after we turned onto 97 a little old man in a little old Japanese truck came flying by us, between us and a big truck with inches to spare. He must have been going about 90 MPH. We were moving at what we thought was a pretty good clip, maybe 70 MPH or so, but that wasn't fast enough for Mr. Wizened old man. It woke us up.

Rubicon Trail, Lake Tahoe & Reno Nevada

Our experience on the Rubicon trail was very similar to that shown in the video. We didn't have any break downs, but it was a real struggle. We spent half of our time scouting the area on foot trying to figure out how we were going to get past the next obstacle.

On our second night we had just made camp when we heard rock and roll music coming from a hill a mile away. It slowly got closer and after a bit we started seeing headlights. Eventually a Jeep rolled up on enormous tires. What had taken us 2 days, these guys had covered in a matter of hours.

The thing that bothers me is I can't be sure just how big those tires were. John bought a set of big fat Dick Cepek tires for his aging F-150 and compared to the tires on my Hyundai, they look huge. But compared to my memory of the tires on that Jeep, they look small. Tires that are just a couple of inches larger in diameter look enormous until you measure them with a ruler and then they seem to shrink down to normal dimensions. It's just weird, man.