Dave Nutting was full of questions on the way to the Vermonster 4×4 Snow Bog last weekend and I was full of hypothetical answers. As many of you loyal readers out there know, I love trucks. Dave’s into lots of stuff and I keep dragging him to places like Vermont to see new things and he hasn’t stopped picking up the phone yet, so I think he’s into it. Anyway, I didn’t have a lot of good answers to many of Dave’s questions because this event was a brand new one on me and even though I see lots of videos and stuff, this was really my first foray into a grassroots style truck event. Yeah, I knew there would be some big machines and that there would probably be a bunch of rigs that had lots of trail miles on them, but beyond that, I had no idea. The event turned out to be cool and it punched all the right buttons for me. The rigs were largely home built by their owners. They were rough in all the right ways. Some were bashed up, oil burning, trail dogs, while others were wearing exoskeletons and packed professionally built motors that made really sweet noise out of their up swept headers that roared into the heavens.

Us car guys think we have a hammer lock on this whole low buck/budget rodding situation, but the mud boggers and off road guys truly own this thing. The photos at the bottom of this page show a Jeep Cherokee that is using a pair of cut up kitchen baking pans as hood scoops or vents (honestly not sure which). I put those photos in this item because it is a great idea and they’re not on the Jeep as some sort of “look at me prop” they are there because the design is functional and probably cost all of six dollars to execute. There is an obvious lack of concern for looks when you are building a truck with the intention of driving over rocks the size of Volkswagens and slogging through mud pits and gumbo holes that would make a stock truck look like the Titanic headed to Davy Jones’ locker.

Lots of the rigs at the event, especially those with oddball bodies swapped onto them started life as plow trucks or farm trucks that just rotted to death after too many New England winters and rather than just take the whole pile to the scrapper, these guys lifted them, swapped more power into them, and with a sense of humor slapped on a VW Beetle body, Camaro body, old ‘Stude body, etc. In their barns the racers are stretching frames, welding up differentials, and doing stuff like the early hot rodders did before it all became kind of conformist and the “formulas” that we all live by in hot rodding now were established. An event like the Vermonster 4×4 Snow Bog  is the equivalent of the early ‘rodders racing on airport runways with little in the way of rules to trip them up. The owners of these rigs are building them the way they want to, fixing them when they break, and flogging them again to see if they are better. This is hot rodding in the purest form.

The whole attitude of the deal was cool. Guys with crazy tube chassis rock buggies were hanging out with drivers in little Suzuki Samurais packing small 31″ tires and minimal lift and having a ball. While the mega-trucks got the majority of the attention due to their sheer massive size, just about every truck in the pits had people climbing over them, looking at their tires, suspension, baking pans, etc. It was like 20-degrees outside and a couple thousand people showed up. That doesn’t sound like much but just going on the location of this event, a few thousand people is a sizable percentage of the population. Why did they show up to see a bunch of low buck guys thrash their stuff? For the same reason Dave and I did. It’s entertaining as hell and totally relatable. I’d see this show 100x over a big corporate monster truck show. When you can actually put yourself into the place of the person that built the rig, it makes everything more fun. Many of these trucks are as complicated as an anvil, but they put on a great show, provide their owners with more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, and probably cost less to build then the wheel and tire package on your car. There’s something infinitely bitchin’ about that.

You show up to the drag strip with baking pans on the hood of your car, they may fail you at tech or laugh you out. At Vermonster those were worth a high five and a smile. Like I said, these guys OWN low-buck.