Ultimate Adventurers wheel Moses Lake

MOSES LAKE - So. Imagine you own an off-road vehicle, maybe expensive, maybe not, but a really kick-well, you know; anyway, a really sick ride. And imagine a trip, somewhere in the contiguous United States (so far), a week on and off-road, just hitting the trail and - driving. Driving and wheeling.

Funnest. Trip. Ever.

The editors at Peterson's 4 Wheel and Off-Road magazine thought so too, and they've sponsored such a trip for more than a decade. The 2012 Ultimate Adventure came to Moses Lake Thursday.

Wheelers started Ultimate Adventure 2012 in Redmond, Ore., hit the trail - mostly back roads, as few highways as possible - north to Mt. Rainier, then to Moses Lake and the sand dunes, then to - look, actually no one knows. No one but editor Rick Pewe, and he wasn't telling.

"That's the key," Pewe said. "No one knows where we are going," said Sebastian Varas, of Santiago, Chile.

"One thousand miles of them not knowing what we're doing," Pewe said.

That mystery is part of the fun, said Luke Shuman, of Spokane. "No one knows where we're going and no one wants to know where we're going," Shuman said. His shop, Hazzard Fab Worx, was chosen to build the show vehicle for 2012.

Pewe was along for the ride, with 10 sponsor representatives, a road crew of three people and six of the magazine's readers. Jim Repp, an engineer who lives near Ann Arbor, Mich., works for Jeep and was riding as one of two company representatives. It was his first time on the trip.

And is it fun? "Hell, yes. Are you kidding?" he said. Pewe sets the itinerary,  and in Repp's opinion he chose wisely when he picked Moses Lake's sand dunes. "Some mud, some sand - we camped out last night and it was beautiful."

The Ultimate Adventure is July 1 through 8. Participants spend a half-day to a full day traveling to each site. "The next day, we wheel all day," Varas said.

Jeep is a primary sponsor, and every year an auto fabrication shop somewhere in the country is selected to build a special vehicle to make the trek. For 2012 the job went to Hazzard Fab Worx. "A big honor for us," Shuman said.

The magazine's editors decide how they want the vehicle tricked out. For 2012 the vehicle is a Jeep Wrangler JK,  and the order was for an off-road vehicle with two front ends.

The company delivered a Wrangler JK, "brand new with zero miles," to Hazzard Fab Worx, and after that it was up to Shuman and his crew. They cut the jeep in half, welded on a second front end and did the chassis and body work necessary to make it run. The build took about three months, he said.

"This one still freaks us out," Carey Osborne said of the Wrangler JK. Osborne was representing a sponsor, Genright, a California-based maker of suspensions, body panels and fenders. This was the second time for Osborne, who was chosen from the reader pool in 2011.

What makes it so much fun, Osborne said, was the opportunity to see parts of the country he'd never seen before, and get a closer look at places he had passed through. Pewe said every year he picks a new route. "We never do the same wheel twice, Or the same roads to get there," he said.

So far the tours have been confined to the lower 48 states and southern Canada. To date the tours have missed only Florida and Iowa, he said. That doesn't mean the tour will stay in the lower 48 - or even in the United States, he said.

Varas shipped his classic Jeep Willys, manufactured in 1942, by container to Los Angeles. Then his jeep and his trip were at the mercy of the American customs system. "Which was a mess, by the way," Varas said. The jeep sat at the port for a week before customs officials would release it, he said

The jeep was a veteran of the European Theater in World War II and was sold in South America after the war. Frankly there wasn't much left of the old girl when Varas found it.

He rebuilt it, uses it wheeling in Chile, and applied for the Ultimate Adventure. It was great to be chosen, pretty expensive to ship his jeep all the way to Los Angeles, and very frustrating to leave it sitting in the port. He was advised to leave all his tools and equipment behind, rather than try and get it through Customs.

And so far it's been worth every penny and every worry, Varas said. "Up to now, it is worth every single thing I had to spend on this project." His jeep has encountered some trouble. "The first day, we had an issue with a rock" that damaged his oil system, and his fellow wheelers rallied around with tools and spare parts.

These are not beauty queens, riding from stop to stop on a trailer. "That's the thing. We drive our vehicles," Pewe said. "And if they break, we fix them."

Pewe maps out the itinerary in late spring, visiting each spot in person. (All stops are approved for offroad use.) When he got to Moses Lake he called Rich Archer, a local resident, to help scope out the dunes. Archer also called a friend who provided water and a place to clean vehicles after wheeling in the dunes. Archer is already getting his application for the reader pool ready for 2013.

The reader pool attracted about 100 applications in 2012, Pewe said. It's not a contest, but there are criteria. "You have to have the right attitude. Attitude is important."