Ellsworth, ME - Every summer in rural Maine, dozens of families haul makeshift monster trucks to a stretch of mud on the outskirts of Ellsworth. They don their helmets, put the pedal to the metal, and cross their fingers that the trucks will make it out the other side faster than anyone else can--hopefully without breaking anything first.
Full story here.
“The fun part for me is seeing what we can fix after it breaks,” said Stephen Ward, a mechanic by trade. On his first run of the year, he broke the transmission right off the motor in his truck, “Mud ’Mater.” Transmissions are so heavy they are usually installed with a jack, but he made do with what he had on hand. “I put it back together with some ratchet straps in time for one of the last runs of the day,” he said.
Usually the mud runners fix the trucks, but in Roger Gilley’s case, Northern Outlaw helped fix him. After a snowmobile accident where Gilley broke both his wrists, he helped himself heal by putting the truck together. “Building Northern Outlaw was a physical therapy,” he said.
Steve Rowley has sunk $30,000 into the 9-foot, 10-inch tall “Double Trouble,” which he co-owns with Craig Hamilton. Other mud runners scrounge junkyards and used cars for any parts they can find. Older parts from before the 1990s are generally more reliable in mud pit conditions, runners say, but the high demand for them makes them hard to find.
The air at a mud run smells of smoke, gasoline and fried food as hundreds of dusty
jeanclad and workbooted Mainers take turns racing their trucks, which sport names like Hawt Mess, The Antagonizer, Green Bean, and Swampy. “As soon as you put the gas pedal to the floor, the nerves are gone,” Ward said. “It’s all concentration after that.”