People - page 2

Timmy Reyes is a professional surfer. BFGoodrich does not encourage anyone to go surfing in dangerous conditions alone or ones that are beyond their ability.

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.

You can learn a lot about a person by what’s in their garage. Take Andrew Comrie-Picard for example. He lives on a quiet, unassuming street. But this Canadian racecar driver, stuntman, TV personality and wine expert has years and years of stories hidden behind his ordinary garage door.

Sometimes big ideas happen quickly. Like the apple that struck Newton with a serendipitous thud, birthing the concept of gravity. But let’s be honest: that story is more of a fairytale, really.

Whether he’s mowing lawns in Virginia on a zero-turn, hauling gear through the Rockies in a diesel Jetta wagon, busing from village to village in Ghana, cruising through Utah’s dunes on a Polaris RZR®, photographing Patagonia from an adapted Ford® 4x4 camping van, or heading to the kitchen for a snack in his wheelchair, Kirk Williams is going places. And he isn’t slowing down for anything.

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.