Exploration

For all walks of life, it’s been a stressful year dominated by uncertainty, grief, and the ever-present anxiety about whether we’ll ever get back to a semblance of life as we knew it before. In so many ways, life this year felt like it was on pause. But in many others, it plowed forward whether we were mentally ready for it or not. Work got done. Holidays passed. And the kids continued to grow up a little too fast.

This isn’t your average sport. There’s no centralized league, major or minor. There’s no standardized rulebook, or official training camp. We don’t have arenas. Or stands full of fans. Or refs on the sidelines calling our plays. There are no conference champions. No sponsorship deals, commercial breaks, or halftime shows.

There is only community.

A few summers ago, Kelly Lund, his girlfriend, Ally Coucke, and their two dogs, Loki and Bailey, made the trip of a lifetime in their 2013 Toyota Tundra: a round-trip trek from Denver, Colorado to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

On November 9th, 2022, deep in the Australian bush, Mikey Wright slid out of the driver’s seat of his beloved Landcruiser 79 Series and held open the driver’s side door for his wife, Shenay. They were a few days into a group off-roading trip, hosted by BFGOODRICH® Tires. And after a lot of encouragement and a bit of the good kind of peer pressure from Mikey and friends, Shenay embarked on her very first run.

There’s a moment during a road trip where you enter a flow state — when you turn off the outside noise, and tune into whatever’s in front of you. In these moments, we’re completely present. And all we need to capture them is distance, drive and a way forward.

Victor Nguyen always dreamed of visiting the Grand Canyon on dirt—you know, the old-fashioned way before there were things like roads. About a year ago, after four years of meticulously planning routes and ironing out dates, he and a group of off-roaders made the journey. Eight trucks embarked on a route that traversed the remote Northern Rim of the Grand Canyon, a route of obscure dirt trails that would take them from the highest point in the canyon to the lowest—a dirt trail that very few people, if any, have ever completed before.

In the winter of 2000, the famous Rubicon Trail was on the verge of being closed off for good.

Tom Holm is the founder of EcoTrek Foundation, a nonprofit with the goal of preserving cultural and natural resources through renewable power, products and practices. A major part of EcoTrek’s business involves converting and modifying vehicles to be more environmentally friendly for demanding expeditions.