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Snow Then Sand in a New F-150, Part 2

Skirtin' some dirt around the So Cal desert

Two days later I got another call. "Justin, we're doing the weekend out past Gordon's Well. You wanna come?"

Play Sand

It was Sammy, excellent BFGoodrich race buddy. He also runs two S.C.O.R.E. desert race teams in El Centro, and is a complete dynamo when it comes to playing in the sand, maintaining a home-built fleet of trucks, buggies and bikes. You'd better enjoy the desert if you live in El Centro—100 miles east of San Diego and in the middle of nowhere. You either farm, race or leave. Best of all, Sammy is one of those buddies who likes to share what he's got, so I wind up in the desert with him on occasion.

He didn't wait long to stick the knife in.

"Bring some firewood."

Oh, man.

Fortunately, the subtle blue 2005 F-150 4x4 was still shading my driveway. Friday afternoon came along the next day, I threw a pile of scrap lumber from my remodel in the truck (you don't bring little logs to the desert—everything burns), grabbed my helmet and race gear, some cold-weather equipment for a night under the stars, filled a cooler and hit the road. One of the beauties of going to the desert from San D is the convenience—the 8 Freeway runs east-west right through town and straight to El Centro, Glamis and countless points east along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Truck Love

It's true that Americans love their big trucks and SUVs. Rolling fast down the highway, in command of your coach from a superior height, it's easy to comprehend the addictive part. It'll be an ugly slide into high-mileage transportation as soon as the dino juice dries up, but until then rigs like the new F-150 make a strong case for being transportation of choice. By the way, why hasn't someone invented synthetic gasoline? (Is that an oxymoron, or is it me?)

I embarked on the tidy sprint out of San Diego proper, surrounded by others heading toward just where I planned. There's a mass weekend exodus from the beach communities to the desert in the winter months (just too hot for the desert in the summer), as families and friends haul their sand rails, quads and bikes, buggies and trucks into the barren wastelands of Imperial County and east. Imagine an adult sandbox, infested with grown children and folks who never forgot how much fun it was to play with toys.

Sammy and company had specified Gordon's Well, about 15 miles east of El Centro and 125 out of San D. As the campsite was never easy to locate, I figured my chances of driving into the aqueduct were about square with finding my friends, and chose to wait for Sam. I camped out on the overpass as the sun set over the Vallecito Mountains and waited for Sammy. About an hour passed as I luxuriated in the F-150 cab—pushed every button in the thing—and zoned out to Orbital's "In Sides" dual-CD.

A sunset in the desert is a beautiful affair; you simply must try one. A Border Patrol agent shot me a look as I sat (white guy in a new truck, very suspicious), and two guys on enduros motored past coming from the south. 'Bout an hour past that sunset, Sammy's big F-250 Super Duty pulled up broadside dragging the toybox (with his VW-powered rail and a quad nestled inside). "Sorry, had to pick up the buggy." It had been apart somewhere else that morning; some assembly required.

As the lifted big-block Super Duty crawled into the dust and sand heading toward the campsite, I dutifully tucked aft. Watching the big truck boinging along over the undulating sandy hardpack that led from the access road to destinations even more sandy, the plumb and stable nature of the redesigned independent double-wishbone front end made me think Sam was getting the short end of the suspension stick. Meanwhile, out back, 500 lbs. of lumber made the F-150's bed a very settled platform. If folks only knew what they were missing, driving around in their 10 year old trucks. I would ask Sam how much he liked, or did not, the behavior of his rig on this sort of "road" surface.

His response was as much indicative of his truck-guy attitude as the concession folks would make to maintain it. The sacrifice of drivability was to functionality. "It works well," he said "and you get comfortable with the predictability." The Super Duty's solid front axle four-wheel drive front end was predictable and robust, but drove like a tractor. Not so with the new F-150—the easy nature of wheeling around in a 2005 was out of character with how trucks are supposed to act, thus our pleasure when sliding around in the sand heading to and from camp. We wondered if that was a piece of the reason for so many lifted new F-150s crawling around in the sand.

Special Delivery

Resisting the incredible temptation of reverse-dumping all the lumber in the F-150's bed (too many nails in that scrap), I backed it up to the meager stack of wood other campers had contributed and started unloading. It was as much as I could fit in the bed, a combination of the odds & ends and leftovers from my demo work (old beams, tired plywood, a bazillion different split and beaten 2x4s, one nasty wicker chair left by an ex-girlfriend, soggy trim and wasted lathe). All was pitched into something resembling a mound. By the time I was done there was enough wood for Burningman (imagine Woodstock with cell phones). Somehow the well-packed load in the bed had grown to a pile the size the F-150 itself. My part of the deal complete, I infested a sweatshirt, parked my folding chair in front of two Honda 600s and quenched my thirst.