Detour #118: Off-road across the USA on the Trans America Trail
Land Rover’s Trans America Trail took intrepid explorers 5,000 miles from coast to coast without touching tarmac. The entire route was off-road, as Gavin Conway can attest.
"We might not make it. I just don't know."
To be honest, that isn't what I'd hoped to hear as I survey a map of remotest Utah and Nevada, criss-crossed as it is with chicken-scratch tracks and barely-there trails. "But don't worry, we'll find a way, as long as it takes." Well that's better. A little.
The man speaking to me is Tom Collins, one of the world's most experienced and able off-road adventurers, a veteran of heroic treks across Borneo, Brazil, Madagascar and much, much more. “We're stuck” just isn't a phrase the man has ever used. However, “this might be difficult” figures prominently.
Collins, 63, is point man on what is probably one of the most adventurous long-range off-road treks ever undertaken in the United States. And the challenge is a simple one, but enormous nonetheless – Collins is leading a convoy of Land Rover Discoverys from the east to the west coast of America with the intention of never setting foot (wheel, actually) on tarmac. That's a distance – not as the crow flies, I hasten to add – of nearly 5,000 miles.
The idea came to Collins via a friend, motorcyclist Sam Correro, who managed to plot a meticulous coast-to-coast off-road trail for motorcycles. Correro spent decades planning his route with obsessive attention to detail, with the bulk of the hard work finished in the last 12 years or so. The result is the Trans America Trail, which intrepid bikers have been using to realise the grandest adventure of all – coast-to-coast on some of the remotest dirt trails in the country. So Collins thought, “why not do the Trail with a four-wheeled off-roader?”
Why not? Well, to begin with, the trail had been plotted with motorcycles in mind, not bloody great four-wheel drives. And because there just wasn't the time to do it, Collins couldn’t recce the route before setting off.
At least not in person – Collins spent weeks putting together an electronic turn-by-turn GPS route, which he cross references with Correro's detailed hard-copy notes. But for a more real-world idea of what these trails were actually like, he turned to that most ubiquitous nav-aid – Google Earth.
"I could literally fly the route with Google Earth," says Collins. "But you know, some trails can be obscured with overhanging vegetation, so there's no way of knowing whether they'll be wide enough for our vehicles. At least, not until you get there to see for yourself." The other problem is that Google Earth isn't real-time and things can change very quickly. "A flash-flood can wipe out a road just like that," explains Collins.
By the time I join the expedition in Utah, it’s been underway for three weeks. To date, the trekkers have narrowly missed being wiped out by a flash-flood, have endured seven punctures and been forced to negotiate rock-strewn trails that would tax even an atypically nimble mountain goat.
Collins welcomes me with a big, friendly, crinkle-eyed smile and the assertion that I've got “the best bit” of the Trail – namely, the bit that's going to be the most challenging, difficult and chaotically unpredictable. This is what Collins calls ”fun.”
We set out at dawn and soon we're picking up serious altitude, rising 1,300ft in the short time since we leave Richfield. The track begins to deteriorate as Collins, hunched over his laptop real-time GPS in the passenger seat, stares intently at the screen. He confides his two major fears; that the track we're headed for will be too narrow for our cars, or that it will have been designated “ATV's only” by the forest services - that's All-Terrain-Vehicles, those little quad bike things. Turns out to be the case and we double back.
Spoiler alert – this is the last time in my nearly 600 miles off-road trek that we will have to abandon the trail, which is about to get spectacular in every possible sense of the word.
We climb down out of the mountains and onto a flat plain that stretches into a vastness that really does need its own rousing soundtrack (Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries might do). And the dirt track is real Vanishing Point stuff, arrow straight and literally disappearing to a tiny point on the far horizon, where a mountain range marches west in ranks of variously shaded silk-screened silhouettes.
Utah carries on in that vein until we reach Baker and our overnight roadhouse stop by the trail. The Border Inn literally straddles the border – and time zone – between Utah and Nevada. And my smartphone turns stupid: it's 8, then its 9, no, its 8, etc, etc.
The following day we drive deeper into remotest Nevada and a terrain that alternates between vast basins bisected by arrow-straight trails and mountain ranges that rise out of the flat like Hollywood sets. The outside temperature gauge on our dash says 103 degrees F. Stepping out of the car is like walking into a pizza oven.
It's the mountain passes that first look like they'll do us in. We come upon a steep sluice of rock that looks like a lava flow frozen in mid-run. One of our crew hops out and acts as a guide for me, pointing left and right as I ease the Discovery down. You've got to trust the man doing the pointing, even as the car begins to list so much that you think you'll fall out of the window.
In the dying light – which is quite spectacularly beautiful in Nevada – we roll into Eureka, elated that we've come through such a tough day's motoring. At least three times, I've thought “that's it, we're done.” On one of those occasions, we would have had to reverse for at least a mile if the cars had been defeated. And sagebrush on the narrow trails is etching its mark onto the sides of our cars – what locals call “desert pinstriping.”
Our final day of motoring is a little less fraught – at one point we manage to cruise for about an hour at nearly 50mph, which feels like a real treat. And then on the horizon I see the tiny community of Battle Mountain, my final destination. I give a little celebratory whoop, but Collins says “you’ll have to get across that first.”
“That” is a track covered in dust as fine as talcum powder – it feels like it’s a couple of feet deep. Our wheels churn up a massive cloud of milky thick dust that buries the following cars, but we’re slowing so much that the cloud begins to envelop our car. We’re finally shrouded in our own cloud of dust and I’m praying that the following Disco doesn’t hit us.
A few minutes later, we get clear and I feel like I’ve made a narrow escape. Now we’re on the outskirts of Battle Mountain with a group of workmen staring bemusedly at our dirt-caked, battle-scarred Land Rovers. I feel like saying something Clint Eastwood-ish.
And all I can think of is “a man’s got to know his limitations.”
Words Gavin Conway Twitter | Instagram
Photography Land Rover
ROADBOOK
CLASS: Off-road Epic
NAME: Trans America Trail
ROUTE: Asheville, North Carolina to Port Orford, Oregon
COUNTRY: USA
DISTANCE: 5,000 miles
Map does not reflect actual route taken.