Pismo Huckfest 2011

It’s always nice to see a first-gen Explorer getting romped on.

A few years ago, a number of friends got together in Oceano Dunes and started hitting the back of a sand dune, flying higher and higher, until they had a whole crowd of people watching. This is all one needs to start something big: Bring in some high-flying trucks, do some simple and logical organizing for safety’s sake, and all of a sudden you, too, might have an unofficial event that is getting so popular that it has put itself at the top of the hitlist for Oceano Dunes SVRA’s park rangers. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Pismo Huckfest.

Chris Brown, Ian Anderson, and twins Johnny and Manuel Garner have coordinated with friends for the past few years to meet at Oceano Dunes to see who has what it takes to outjump all others. Each year, more trucks and spectators show up to participate in or watch the action.

For June 2011’s Huckfest, the unofficial organizers tell us that they got the okay from rangers just hours before Huckfest was to start. Trucks jumped for a few hours—sometimes landing more than 100 feet from takeoff—until one final, slightly sideways landing of a Ford Ranger got the authorities concerned enough to call it quits. Hundreds of spectators watched uniformed park rangers shut down what has become one of the most exciting jump competitions in the country, but not before a handful of trucks flew the friendly skies. We even heard that the rangers had spread rumors the night and morning before Huckfest about the possibility of dishing out tickets to anyone who showed up.

Don’t worry—the Huckfest gang is hard at work getting the permits for next year, and we expect nothing less than an airshow dogfight. Thanks to sponsors like PCI Race Radios, Baja Designs, and Dezertdepot.com, Huckfest shall return in 2012. In the meantime, check out Poly Performance’s awesome vid up on YouTube, or find a link to it on facebook.com/offroadmag for great footage of this and previous years’ contests. OR

A few buggies hit the big jump, but Huckfest was mostly about trucks.

If we may be so bold as to make a suggestion to organizers and the rangers for when June 2012 comes around: Enthusiasts are going to come to jump their trucks in the sand dunes no matter what. Perhaps it would be best to give sanction to the Huckfest, and have each Huckfest driver get a special flag or sticker (to jump)after signing a waiver and paying an extra insurance fee when entering the park. Allowing organizers to organize and put up cones and take safety precautions is a lot safer than a bunch of hyped-up prerunners jumping wherever and whenever they want with hundreds of people standing around.