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Story & photos by Perry Mack
Desert Chase - Tearing up buggies and the desert of Nevada
"Drive it like you stole it" is rule #2, said the shuttle bus driver. "Keep your hands inside the roll cage so you don't lose an arm is rule 3". He paused. "What's rule 1?" I had to ask the obvious question. "The left peddle is just decoration, stay on the gas and have fun", he replied. Pinch me, I must be dreaming.
Crawling across the Canadian landscape in a 4WD is standard operating procedure for most weekend wheelers, with a fix what you break caveat. Racing full tilt off-road across the desert with a licence to beat the crap out of the vehicle and not repair it is a dream come true.
Sunbuggy.com is a tour company with a twist about 20 minutes outside of Las Vegas. The shuttle bus picked us up at our hotel and drove to their offices where we filled out the requisite waivers, were fitted for helmets, given a short briefing (the rollovers cost extra speech) and then boarded another shuttle to the 15,000 acre state park run by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Ours was a one-hour chase through the desert. One guide, one chase/repair truck (with spare buggy in tow) and five drivers salivating at the opportunity to rattle their bones in a wild off-road desert adventure was the order of the day.
You might be disappointed with the vehicle specs. A 650cc Honda engine, rear wheel drive and designed to run like a snowmobile - no shifting, and a governor on the engine to keep you under 60 kph. The truth of the matter is that 60 kph is enough for racing across the rolling desert with its accompanying blind turns, gulches, rocks, sage brush, dunes the size of ocean swells and 30 metre drops into ravines that will swallow you as easily as a blue whale swallows a thousand krill - in one bite.
After 30 minutes of spinning tires and flying debris, we stopped for a break atop one of the peaks for some water and a photo op. This is good because the driving is so intense you have no time to look around at the scenery for fear of picking a poor line and either getting stuck in the sand or launching off a one metre drop that ends in a bone jarring crash.
The break also allowed us an opportunity to get a good look at our buggies. They have been driven like they were stolen. Dented rims, bent steering wheels, dings, scrapes, bald tires with multiple sidewall repairs, just to name a few of the injustices they had survived. Weld on a machine gun turret, pierce your nose and nipples, and add some body armour and you'd be ready to film a MadMax sequel.
By now every driver was comfortable with the machines capability, and their driving ability. Gas peddles were pinned as cars drifted through rock strewn corners, bounced at full throttle through kidney bruising whoops and banked turns off three metre dune faces. The final challenge was approaching, and we had been warned how to tackle it, but not exactly when it would happen. Devils Falls was a drop into a 30-metre ravine with a step 2/3 of the way down. With too much speed, you could endo over the step, but with just enough speed, you get a heart racing adrenalin surge and a moment where time slows, as you are unsure of your fate.
60 minutes after the chase began we returned to the staging area. We followed all three rules we were given, resulting in two cars stuck in the soft sand, wheels pointed to the sky at the apex of a dune, and one car broken down and replaced on the trail by the chase vehicle.
We left with a hit to our credit cards but it was still a fraction of the cost of running our trail vehicles across that desert terrain at the those speeds. Use sunscreen, hydrate and "drive it like you stole it".