The Commandant Report: 36 Hours of Uwharrie

In it’s third year of operation and organized by Path Less Traveled, American Adventurist staff members have been the Camp Commandants for this event since it’s inception, motivating and challenging the participants on many different levels as this endurance event evolves each year.
As 4WD educators, trainers and consultants, we’ve had a unique opportunity to shape the style and tone of this event from the ground up, and we get a lot of questions about what it is, and what it isn’t. Here’s some thoughts from “Inside the Wire”.

What IS this 36 Hours of Uwharrie thing about anyway? 

36 Hours of Uwharrie is a “military themed” back-country endurance challenge. Two-person teams accumulate points by completing missions including precision off-road driving, navigation, vehicle recovery techniques, canoeing, first aid, marksmanship with rifle, pistol, and clay shooting. Competitors are purposely pushed to their physical and mental limits, and must be self-sufficient as they navigate their vehicles to compete in individual and team based events at various stations hidden throughout the Uwharrie National Forest and private properties in Montgomery County, North Carolina.

No outside support is allowed, and they must complete the event with what they brought. No trailers, no pit crews, no pizza deliveries, no showers. Two people and one machine with whatever gear and supplies they can fit inside it. Because that’s all they will have once they enter the Forward Operating Base.

What this event is not about, it’s not a Boot Camp. With the exception of a mandatory period of instruction on firearms safety and first aid, we don’t have time to teach or train them on what they need to know to win. That’s not the goal of the Commandants or the event organizers at Path Less Traveled. Well maybe a little tongue in cheek “motivation” might be needed now and then to liven things up, but the point of a military theme is to inject purpose-driven friction and discipline into the event – teamwork, hustle, safety considerations, execution of the timelines right down to fueling the vehicles at the end of the day, and ensuring sleep and hydration plans are adhered to. And don’t forget that Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). All done in cadence and by the numbers. The military theme as operationalized by our veteran military instructors from the Navy and Marine Corps allows us to ensure very little time is wasted while maximizing safety and the overall experience for the competitors.

Each year the event is different. Staff members burn the midnight oil, formulating new and challenging ideas to keep veteran teams off balance, and new contestants surprised. This year the teams had to throw axes. Yes, AXES. As in throw them for points. Bet they didn’t practice that before they showed up in North Carolina! It’s easy enough as long as they don’t hit the hostage!

Think you can shoot? Try hitting steel targets with rifle and pistol and clays with a shotgun when you’re tired and stressed out. Hurry up and safely exit our range!

Why would anyone subject themselves or their vehicles to these conditions?

This one is simple really. 36 Hours of Uwharrie is not for everyone. It pays to be a winner and this event attracts winners. It’s been said by many that the average recreational “outdoorsman” or off-roader doesn’t have what it takes to even finish this event. The maximum effective range of an excuse in Uwharrie is zero meters. So you need to be in shape. There are no amenities. We do not care who sponsored you, what you drive, or who you are in your day job. You need to have a thick skin and a sharp mind to survive here or the forest will break you. And quitting, always a temptation, is as easy as driving away…

36 Hours of Uwharrie is about GO time, ALL the time. It’s a level playing field where a $100K rig guarantees you nothing. Nothing but a few jeers from those finishing the same obstacles in a $5K bomber class truck. Because if you can’t drive, navigate, shoot, communicate, repair, recover, and rinse & repeat then you have no chance here. Because it’s Carolina hot (average 90 degrees and 90% humidity), and Uwharrie fights you with bugs and mud and rain and rocks. Add about 4 hours of sleep day after day with little food and it just isn’t enough for normal people. But there are those who embrace it, who smile all day every day, because they get it.

The real key to victory here is not your rig or the latest high speed equipment, it’s your attitude. It’s what’s in your heart and between your ears.

Gray’s Off-Road featured Tommy and Casey Gray, a father and son team. Tommy lost 60 pounds to be ready to compete with his son Casey this year. This picture was taken on his 52nd birthday!

A NOTE ABOUT PHOTOS: I took most of these on the fly using a Canon G7X Mark II. 99% of these photos are unedited and unfiltered. Real. Just like the fine Americans you meet at this event.

And that’s why they come back year after year. It’s FUN and it’s personal. They’re bettering themselves and their skills and they know it. Just competing in an event like this is a huge accomplishment all by itself. Our Veterans understand when we say that Pride is Forever, because they’ve earned it, and our respect. Like these two cheeky monkeys below. They know that teamwork makes the dream work.

And the question that get’s asked the most: Are they CRAZY?

YES! Yes they are. This event draws the very BEST people from all over the country and from every walk of life. They are the dreamers, the gamblers, the builders, and the fabricators. Professional racers with big-name corporate sponsorship; “regular Joe & Jane’s” who weld and wrench all year long to take a shot at the professionally sponsored teams, and the growing number of husband and wife teams looking for a challenge that’s off grid and authentic. Or, a good reason to get a divorce.

36 Hours of Uwharrie attracts scores of the very best people in the outdoor and 4WD industry. They work tirelessly behind the scenes organizing stations, working media and drones (rumors abound of a 4 part miniseries on this event this year), and the Volunteers from the local community that see the value of an authentic, “no holds barred” endurance challenge that brings out the best in people and honors one of our oldest American values: rugged individualism.

There is no other event like it.

One feature of 36 Hours of Uwharrie that deserves more attention is that it offers great benefit to the surrounding Uwharrie National Forest community in the short and long term. Local businesses see hundreds of thousands of dollars because of recreation in the Uwharrie National Forest, and this event is putting them on the map on the east coast. Money means jobs. And our friends at Tread Lightly! are heavily involved here too: each year missions are purpose built around the TREAD principles where we require our teams to remove trash from the forest left behind by careless campers. All positive impacts and part of a larger picture aimed at promoting RESPONSIBLE outdoor recreation and fun across America.

Teams and Volunteers alike leave this event more knowledgeable than before and better prepared to be LEADERS on the trail and in their community. Are YOU driver enough to join us in 2019?

There would be no 36 Hours of Uwharrie without the amazing army of Volunteers (thank you!) and the visionary efforts of I4WDTA Master Trainer Scott Fields, and this year’s event was dedicated to his memory.  BIG thanks to the local community in Eldorado and Uwharrie and to Mr. John Byrd for being there with his lens to help me capture important memories like this one below.
JOIN US in Uwharrie October 25-28 2018 for American Adventurist’s 5th Annual Appalachian Rendezvous! Laid back, come as you are camping and wheeling open to members, register HERE and we hope to see you there!

Project Tundra // Winter (Pre-OXW) Update

RXT Rear Suspension

Late last fall, Project Tundra received a pre-production set of ICON Vehicle Dynamics RXT rear suspension – and the change these RXT parts made to the vehicle’s performance was profound.  The RXT system is made up of a user-configurable, Icon leaf spring pack that replaces the OEM Toyota leaf pack. Also included are Tundra specific shocks with increased travel, and a hydraulic bump stop kit.  Taken as a whole, these parts all work together to make your rear suspension next level.  Project Tundra already has the hydraulic bump stop kit, but adding the RXT leafs and shocks made a huge difference in the way the truck performs.  The best part about the RXT kit is that it can be configured to your specific truck and the amount of additional weight you have in your truck bed, so the end result is a system that will deliver much better performance than a one size fits all solution.  Here’s how it all works.

The RXT leafs for the Toyota Tundra can be configured in three ways all depending on how much additional weight is over your truck’s rear axle, or how much lift you want.  The leaf pack comes configured from ICON to handle an additional 250 pounds of payload while providing about 1.75 inches of additional lift.  If you swap out the third leaf in the RXT leaf pack with the provided additonal leaf, the pack will handle an additional 500 pounds of payload and add 3 inches of lift.  Finally, adding the additional leaf to the pack will provide 750 pounds of carrying capacity and add 4 inches of lift to the rear of an unladen Tundra.

I opted for the + 500 pounds option on Project Tundra, as two dirtbikes or our typical gear loadouts with the truck cap and roof rack come in around this mark.

Installing the leaf packs is easily done in the driveway on an afternoon with basic tools and an extra set of hands.  The first thing you’ll need to do is choose what configuration you want the leaf pack in, and then make any desired changes prior to mounting to the vehicle  A couple of C-Clamps will help you keep the packs from disassembling themselves when you loosen the locating bolt, and otherwise the process is well covered in the instructions.  With the packs configured as desired, lift up the back of the truck SAFELY and swap the packs out.

The other part of the RXT equation are the shocks which provide additional stroke over the 2.5 VS CDCV units that we’ve been using.  ICON offers three levels of shocks, named with their Stage-Number convention.  Stage 1 shocks offer vehicle specific valving, Stage 2 adds the CDC Valve, and Stage 3 adds Omega-level shocks that feature rebound and compression damping.  All RXT kits include the hydraulic bump stop Kit – another system we’ve absolutely loved having on Project Tundra.

As I mentioned in the last article, the performance difference realized by installing the IVD suspension on Project Tundra was huge, so the bar was already set quite high when the RXT parts arrived.  The RXT suspension makes a night and day difference over stock leafs or even an add-a-leaf – especially when you’re carrying any kind of weight.

Speaking of the Icon 2.5 VS CDCV shocks I took off the vehicle, I’m happy to report that after a year of use all over the Southwest the shocks are still in great shape and still fully functional.  Yes, there is pitting on the lower shock mounts and the aluminum bodies aren’t as shiny as new, but this wear has been earned from logging thousands of miles bombing around off-road and on wintry roads.  It turns out flying rocks are an equal opportunity destroyer, so I don’t care whose shock you have – pitting and aluminum oxidation are going to happen.  What counts is that all of the ICON shock shafts look great, and all of the seals are holding tight – so these shocks still have plenty of life left in them before they get rebuilt.

The RXT suspension has handled every type of terrain I’ve pointed it at so far with performance that’s perfectly matched to the front end, which is to say that the back end has now been turned up to match the front end.  The ability to set the leaf pack up for your specific vehicle depending on what you do with your truck and how much weight you carry combined with the damping adjustment from the CDCV and Omega level shocks make the RXT system the choice for Tundra rear suspension.

 

 

LINE-X

Spray-In truck bed liners are hands down the best way to project your truckbed from sharp tools, ski edges, car parts, the occasional steel-fab project, and everything else life throws at your truck bed.  The problem is that the OEM spray in liners leave a lot to be desired, which is why I took a trip to San Diego before SoCal Desert Rendezvous to make an appointment at Line-X of San Diego.

At Line-X of San Diego, Dallas and Chris applied their years of experience in truck bed coatings to come up with in a spray in bedliner application for Project Tundra that was exactly what I was looking for.  In addition to protecting the sheet metal, I wanted to do a few custom things that would make the bed of project Tundra better suited to my needs.  First up, I pulled off the stupid plastic caps that run around the bed rails of the truck.  These pointless pieces of plastic exist only to trap dirt and dust, and when sandwiched with a load (like a truck cap) become plastic backed sandpaper that wears on your paint and in no time at all, starts wearing on bare metal.  Taking the plastic caps off also allowed Dallas and Chris to do a true over the rail bedliner, providing extra protection to the bedsides from the truck cap and from me when I’m loading heavy things over the sides of the truck bed.

With all of the holes in the bed rails covered, we then turned our attention to sealing up all of the drain holes in the truck bed to make the thing as dust proof as possible.

Line-X is also a great thing to spray on your truck’s rocker panels to protect them from rocks and other road debris that are constantly tossed up by your tires.  I sprayed the rocker panels on my Tacoma, and it’s held up great to hundreds of thousands of miles of dirt and rocks.  Again Dallas and Chris applied their expert hands and took the time to remove the plastic wheel well trim so that they could tuck the Line-X under the plastic bits once installed – a detail that will only serve to help lengthen the lifespan of Project Tundra’s sheet metal.

Chris and Dallas devoted an entire day to applying Line-X to Project Tundra, and the results of their attention to detail and skill speak for themselves.  Project Tundra’s bed and rocker panels are now armored-up to handle hundreds of thousands of miles of dirt and rock, and all of the gear hauling I can throw in the truck bed.

ABOUT THOSE HUB CAPS

I’ve had a couple of the hub caps on my ICON Alloys Six Speed wheels break, and when I called Icon to asking about buying new hub caps, I was really happy to hear that they’ve redesigned the caps to fix this very issue.  The new hub caps are screwed together (the old design was a snap-fit) and I do not expect to see any failure or issues from this new design.  I need to give ICON props for revising and continuously improving their products, rather than simply selling more copies of an imperfect design.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Yes, Project Tundra will be getting fully armored – but as with any good thing, it takes some time.  So in the mean time I’ve been working with Pelfreybilt Offroad to design brackets for the Tundra’s A-Pillars and stock front bumper, so that I can add some light while I’m waiting for my armor to arrive.  With a bit of time spent in Solidworks, I’ve developed A-Pillar brackets for the Tundra that will hold an XL 80, as well as brackets that will allow me to run a Baja Designs 30” S8 light bar in the stock bumper.

Project Tundra will be receiving it’s armor soon, so I’ll leave this update with a photo I took of what’s to come.  Stop by and see us at the American Adventurist booth at Overland Expo West (PS1) and say hi!

Full disclosure:  ICON Vehicle Dynamics provided the RXT suspension for review and testing purposes at no cost to Chad de Alva or American Adventurist.  Line-X of San Diego installed their products free of charge.