Heaven is a Shitshow: Chaos and Country at King of the Hammers
My first encounter with the Super Bowl of off-roading
HAPPY RACE DAY! especially to everyone who showed me a great time at King of the Hammers over the weekend. It’s truly a mind-blowing experience, thanks, of course, to the people who care enough to make a newcomer feel welcome.
There are great stories and great humans all over at KOH. Check out this tribute to the late, great Jessi Combs by racer Hurricane Felton, and my IG Reel from the winner’s stage of JP Gomez’s overall win at the Nitto Race of Kings.
And for S’s and G’s, check out my article on the Tesla Cybertruck, above, that battled the terrain at KOH and came up limping with a broken bolt. (My personal view? There are lots of reasons to question the CT’s viability — this one seems rather innocent and understandable, but still a fun story to report.)
Now here’s this week’s main article:
My Night in the Off-Road Jungle
THE FIRST ACCIDENTAL FIREWORK detonated somewhere near my feet. I never saw it. But it felt like a shockwave of noise – my ears throbbed, and my head went kind of heavy. I was too stunned to react. So I looked to the others around me. Nearly to a person, they each took a second, shrugged it off, smiled, and went back to what they were doing. An errant explosive wasn’t enough to deter their fun. After all, this was what they came for. Welcome to King of the Hammers. Welcome to the jungle. Welcome to the last bastion of anything goes.
We’ve all come to a place called Hammertown. Nestled into the dry lake bed of Johnson Valley in the California wilderness, this normally deserted vastness transforms into a vibrant metropolis for several weeks at the beginning of each new year. For most of the tens of thousands in attendance, it’s under the guise of watching King of the Hammers, a three-week morass of off-road motorsports where motorcycles, ATVs and race trucks compete to win trophies, championships and lucrative sponsor attention. Critically, Hammertown is located on land enforced by the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. That means it isn’t quite bound by California law, but by federal law, where the regulations are… ambiguous. And if rangers haven’t exactly given up on policing Hammertown, they’ve certainly ceded control. To many, that means just about anything goes.
So every night, when the sun goes down and it’s too dark for any official racing, command over the festivities are unofficially passed from King of the Hammers to the residents of Hammertown at large. And one by one, they leave their campsites and wobble their ATVs and their pickups and their home-built, steel-skeleton rigs toward a treacherous pass on the horizon known colloquially as Chocolate Thunder. The vehicles file into a base camp where they point headlights at the top of the trail, and spectators file into position on either side of the canyon, perched on any solid ground they can find like weary seabirds nesting on rocky outcrops. And the chaos of getting up and over Chocolate Thunder commences.
Chocolate Thunder is no joke. It’s an extremely tight and technical course, stuffed with boulders and jagged edges along the cliff wall that can rip a tire to shreds. Not everyone will succeed. But succeeding is beside the point. There is no shame in being stopped, slowed or defeated by Chocolate Thunder. Getting stuck or stranded is fine. You simply become an obstacle for the other trucks to climb over and around. You become an opportunity for the next person to leap into action, unleashing their mechanical winch or rocking your frame back and forth to find traction. Some people will complete the course, get to the top, and loop right back around to do it again. Others won’t make it 100 yards all night. There are no trophies here.
The real point is celebration. People come to Hammertown, and especially to Chocolate Thunder, to participate in something that feels uniquely their own. They might call it culture – one based on libertarian principles and free living, of BYOB and doing hard things with muscle and solid axles and brute strength. It’s about picking your own vantage point, and assuming the personal responsibility to move when all of the sudden a truck turns and you’re in the goddamn way. But it is not without the collective. It’s also about passing beers to strangers and offering to move so a bewildered journalist can get a better vantage point. Fireworks explode overhead, popping against the dark sky and casting the madness below in a festive rainbow of grunt work. You can feel the party pulsing from miles away.
The second real point is rebellion. Johnson Valley, being BLM land, is a place where people can comfortably be their authentic selves. It’s a place where ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ and ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ flags are the norm, and where you won’t be asked to square your contradictions and hypocrisies. It’s where a Jeep waving a Confederate flag, championed by people who fought to preserve slavery, will unironically blare Ice Cube and Sir Mix-A-Lot from its speakers. And it will be cheered vivaciously by onlookers yelling “America!” It’s a safe space for the unapologetic and indefensible.
Here there is no such thing as decorum. But that doesn’t mean it is without consequence. There is an unspoken system of self-policing that metes out justice quickly when certain lines are crossed. Sometimes the lines are for safety, like last year, when a Jeep driver was pulled out of his vehicle after almost ramming into a crowd of spectators. Sometimes the lines are for respect, like this year, when a woman hopped out of her rig to confront a group of hecklers and upon seeing one of the men wave a dismissing hand in her direction, one-two clocked him.
There’s lots to worry about in the world. There’s wars going on. Rising ocean levels and atmospheric rivers. Human rights issues, race and gender discrimination, and economic inflation run by a blind allegiance to growing wealth disparity that robs indiscriminately from track rats and off-roaders alike. But none of that is here. The world is on fire. Here the fires are only literal. Here at Chocolate Thunder, this pile of rocks and dirt on unregulated land is the center of the universe for one night. Here there are trucks and lasers and fireworks, and like-minded lunatics. Here, things are simple. Better live it up while it lasts.
And Finally…
Well would you lookie here. The auction site Bring A Trailer last week sold an extremely rare R34 Skyline GT-R N1 for an even $325,000. Whooo-eee!
As I wrote in Cult of GT-R, the R34 GT-R is the big kahuna of the Skyline world, and the N1 models are nearly unmatched in their exclusivity and pedigree. (All of the famous Mine’s R34 GT-Rs were N1 models, for reference.) Given that more common models are fetching $250,000 pretty easily these days it seems a reasonable buy if you reeeeeally need a special GT-R in your life.
Come back next week for a WHOLE lot of GT-R talk on the way. Excited to say more very soon! Have a great week.
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