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From The Thing to a Land Rover Defender, vintage vehicles take on the Southern Cross Xpedition
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Onlookers ogled vintage vehicles in a corner booth at Overland Expo West in Flagstaff this past weekend. Old timers recalled the days when overlanding was for the hardy, and you had to earn your adventure stripes with scratches and dings and bangs and bruises rather than buying a ready-to-go, four-wheel drive luxury rig. Youngsters circled and marveled at the rusty, trusty steeds with all old school mechanical parts except for their rooftop tents.
Peter Vollers of Placitas wants again to experience the past, the rattles, bumps and grinds — no air conditioning and no electronics — and he thinks others do as well.
“I think there’s going to be a movement back to these types of things, because it just is so much more challenging and tactile and experiential in the long run than just hopping in a brand-new vehicle with all the stuff. And I’m not saying one’s better or worse than the other. I’m just saying that market would be different. It’s a new challenge,” he said during a Q&A session at Overland Expo on May 17.
The vehicles were on display while being made trail ready for the Southern Cross Xpedition. Vollers is taking on the challenge in his 1960s-era two-wheel drive Volkswagen bus with his sidekick, a Jack Russell/mini dachshund named Dash.
Eight hardy souls were scheduled to start this adventure from Flagstaff on May 19. The team includes seven drivers, a videographer on a motorcycle and a famous passenger: Michael Hussey, who was part of the U.S. team that won the 1993 Camel Trophy in a yellow Land Rover. That competition, renowned as an Olympics of 4-by-4 driving, was a 1,000-mile expedition through a Malaysian jungle that tested teams’ mettle with events and challenges. Amateur drivers took part in it from about 1980 to 2000 in remote regions across the world.
Candi Skehan, who purchased her first Jeep at eighteen, is driving a classic 1986 Jeep Cj7. Her husband, the team mechanic, who helped prep the vehicles, is not on this trip.
The Sunday before this new expedition, while talking up the trip and displaying the rigs to some of the estimated 30,000 attendees at the overland show at Fort Tuthill County Park, the drivers were wrenching, ratcheting and welding in preparation for the crawl along parts of Arizona and New Mexico’s backcountry discovery routes. The trip’s terminus is near Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, with a celebration along the Rio Chama in about two weeks. The journey has been named the Southern Cross Xpedition because it heads south out of Flagstaff toward Mexico and then crosses back toward the north and east to New Mexico, Vollers said.
“We’re basically utilizing two already existing routes … If you didn’t know these, the back road discovery routes are the best kept secret in overlanding,” he said. These routes are used by motorcycles and overland vehicles, usually four-wheel-drive.
Too often, hopeful overlanders spend weeks, months or years planning, but Vollers said this plan came together quickly. Sometimes you just need to put up the tools, pack the provisions and go, he said.
And why would you follow a backcountry route rather than take major roads to get to awesome destinations?
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“It’s more important just to ... take the scenic route,” he said. And most of these vehicles can’t go more than 50 mph for any extended period of time. It took more than 10 hours to make the trek on backroads from Placitas to Flagstaff, a route newer vehicles make in about six hours or can traverse via Interstate 40 even faster.
You can’t call AAA or a wrecker when you are 50-miles away from paved roads in a forest or high-country desert, said Michael Ladden of Baja California, Mexico. So it is safest to travel in groups or caravans like this one, he said.
“I think five of the seven trucks have winches, so you’ve got lots of straps to pull people with, that is to recover a stuck vehicle and keep going,” he said.
The expedition was originally conceived to get Ladden’s 1965 Land Rover back into adventure after it sat idle since completing a trans-Africa expedition in 2001. Ladden recently moved the Land Rover to his friend’s dry Placitas home to stop a slow death by rusting.
Videographer Daniel Brewer is following on motorcycle to capture the journey and to provide support. He can rush into town to grab parts as needed, the group said. He is also the cook.
“Each mile offers the chance to reconnect with nature while experiencing the nostalgia of classic vehicles tackling challenging landscapes,” according to the expedition website.
Despite the vehicles being low tech with no air conditioning and all having carburetors instead of electronics, you can follow the adventure on instagram.com/drivetheglobe.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” said Mike Ford, the driver of a bright yellow VW Thing.
