In the mid '80s, the U.S. military turned to commercial truck suppliers to fill some of their vehicle needs. Many of these came from the Chevrolet Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicle (CUCV) design beginning in 1984. The pickup truck was the M1008 version based on the Chevy K2500 with some beefy upgrades. The trucks were rated at 1 1/4 tons.

Kyle Eisner knew he wanted this 4runner a long time before it was his. He's the second nowner behind an old neighbor who bought it new and took good care of it. kyle told that neighbor he'd buy it whenever it might go up for sale. his patience paid off and it dropped into his hands bone stock.

Ford introduced the Bronco II back in 1984 as a scaled-down version of the venerable fullsize Bronco that was so popular. It was met with mixed emotions, as it is to this day. However, I was always intrigued by the mini Bronco and decided it was time to give one a try—especially after some of our Off-Road staff unaffectionately dubbed it “one of the worst 4x4s ever.” I was determined to prove my colleagues wrong, and I liked the idea of the TTB coil front setup and the basic leaf spring rear. I found an ’85 Eddie Bauer version on Craigslist advertised for $1,400. It turned out to have a rust-free body and ran fairly decent. After a little haggling, I handed over $1,100 and was soon driving away in the baby Bronco.

The off-road world has changed notably over the decades that humans have pursued motorized adventure off the beaten path and the paved expanses. New innovations have allowed us to go faster over rougher terrain, jump higher, crawl slower, and tackle bigger boulders. Along with that, we can travel into the backcountry to explore in greater comfort and with the assurance of greater reliability in our vehicle gear.

It’s not every day that we see a tow rig blasting through the dunes, especially since they usually get left behind with all the gear and trailers back at the campsite. As you’ve probably guessed by now, we’re really big fans of fullsize trucks here at OFF-ROAD magazine, so when we spotted Austin Lessel’s 2006 Chevy 2500HD Duramax diesel ripping through the dunes at blazingly fast speeds—with paddle tires, no less—we knew we had to catch up to him to get a better look at his awesome crew-cab Duramax.

Setbacks and success seem like polar opposites, but there are times when one can lead to the other. Keith Minnicks can tell you all about it. A self-described adrenaline junkie and extreme sports enthusiast, Keith was part of the amateur motocross circuit in Nevada and Arizona. When he wasn’t on his dirt bike, he was usually selling motorcycles at a Las Vegas dealership where he worked. “I was the number one salesman for several months in a row,” Keith relates. “I loved talking to people, and I had a deep passion for what I was talking about.”

It takes guts, skill, money, fortitude, and determination to race off-road. It takes all these attributes plus more to actually win races. Standing on the podium with a trophy in hand is the dream of every racer out there, but many will tell you that it's a win just to finish an off-road race. To come in a step ahead of your competition … well, that's what separates the trophy holders from everyone else.

It’s not every day that you spot a race truck out in the dirt, unless of course you’re down in Baja. Lucky for us, Jeff Angeleri was in the dunes for a chance spotting while out shooting one day. After chasing him through the dunes for a few minutes, we were able to catch up with him and check out his awesome ’94 Ford F-250 1450 race truck. Jeff built this truck to compete in the MDR 1450 class series, but he ended up on crutches about a year into the build after breaking his hip during a local motocross race. Not one to give up, Jeff continued building his race truck at home outside in the dirt, despite having to use crutches, and even painted it himself in his own backyard.

Heading into its fifth year of sales, the Ford Raptor F-150 continues to be a hot seller. As one of only a few 4x4s specifically built for off-road use, it’s no surprise that dealerships have trouble keeping these trucks in stock. What is a bit of a surprise is how many Raptor owners purchase aftermarket parts. For a truck with such small sales numbers (compared to its parent F-150 truck), it is astonishing how many parts are offered and sold for Ford Raptors. For many companies, Raptor bolt-ons are the hottest sellers. For companies that got in on the ground floor with quality Raptor products, the Raptor has made them a mint. Jared Hare, owner of Addictive Desert Designs, saw it coming. He got a Raptor into ADD’s talons as soon as he could to start seeing what future Raptor owners would want. Before most Raptor owners even bought their trucks, ADD already had bumpers, gusset kits, and racks ready to go.

We’re huge fans of XJ Cherokees since they can still be had for very little cash and can be built into very capable trail rigs with simple bolt-on parts. Chris Faustmann’s ’96 Jeep Cherokee caught our attention during the Easter Jeep Safari in Moab—a place notorious for oceans of Jeeps—earlier this year, and yet this XJ stuck out like a bright red exotic car. Well, there’s a very good reason for that! Not only did Chris build this XJ to perform on technical trails and rock gardens; he built it to look good doing it! Of course, when it came time to choose a color, who could go wrong with Ferrari red?

There’s no single formula for getting your truck into our annual four-truck list of favorites. Each of these trucks had a unique “something” that made them stand out beyond the rest of the 2012 feature trucks. The common denominator? These trucks were built to suit their respective owners’ needs, tastes, and budgets. Our advice? Build your truck to fit your world, and let the chips (and photos) fall where they may.

Jared Pugh, owner of Rock & Roll Offroad, needed a truck to serve multiple duties for his shop and his racing and dirt pursuits. He chose a ’12 Dodge 2500 Ram 4WD as his base. The big diesel rig serves as his daily driver around the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolis. However, it was designed to also be a chase truck for the shop’s #53 trophy truck, and it serves as a prerunner before their racer hits the course.

Sometimes it’s lonely at the top, but in off-road racing the top of the heap is kinda crowded. That’s because there are about a half-dozen fabrication shops whose work stands out above the rest. Based in Santee, California, Stewart’s Raceworks is one of those top shops.

“We’re all friends,” says Craig Stewart of Stewart’s Raceworks. “But it’s still competition. We all want to be better than the others.”

Craig Stewart is the son of Ivan “Ironman” Stewart, a pedigree that put him in contact with off-road racing from the very beginning. He enjoyed the racing, but found himself drawn to the machinery more than anything else. “I always loved the cars,” Craig comments. “I would always pay attention to the way they were made, right down to the small details.”

If you are a regular reader of OFF-ROAD, you know that we love S-10s and even have our own S-10 project—the Almighty Dime. These downsized Bow Ties are like the Rodney Dangerfield of the 4WD world: they get no respect.

Beginning in 2011, Off-Road set out to annually recognize individuals from our world of dirt and truck motorsports. It’s an honor given to an individual who doesn’t just stand out by contributing to the industry but is also a trailblazer in and an asset to our off-road community.

This year, we’re renaming the honor as OFF-ROAD magazine’s People of the Year Award, because we’re recognizing two individuals: Ken and Gene Neal. These siblings reside in Mesa, Arizona, and are the owners of BulletProof Diesel.

It’s not every day you see a clean classic truck off road, let alone one that can rip through the desert at high speeds. Like most of us, Tom Webber wanted a truck he could drive back and forth to work but still be somewhat capable for camping and desert trips on the backroads of Baja.

We have showcased a great deal of unique vehicles in OFF-ROAD Magazine. Street-legal VW Thing prerunners, Dodge Ram Runners with quadralink suspensions, and now we present you with Jon Kennedy’s Tacoma.

There are two kinds of guys on the trail. those who bring a pair of vise grips and some zip ties and hope for the best, and those who bring everything necessary to rebuild an entire vehicle. Jeff Pichler definitely falls into the latter category with his 1957 M37.

Jeff’s M37 has the relatively rare V41 utility box option, so he worked with Max-Bilt of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to turn his truck into the ultimate Trail Recovery Vehicle (which explains the M-TRV stickers on the hood). This mobile workshop has all of the hardware necessary not only to fix other vehicles, but do plenty of off-roading in its own right.

“No one gets there alone.” This is an overused cliché, but the quest to build a dream truck is seldom a solo undertaking.

For Scott DeCurtis, the quest goes back a long way. “As a young kid, my father had a 1984 Toyota 4Runner that he originally bought off the lot that same year,” DeCurtis relates. “All through my teenage years, it was ingrained into my head that there was no better engineering or reliability than Toyota. When I saw the early ’90s body style of the Toyota pickups I decided I wanted one for my first truck.”

There’s no doubt that classic trucks are just plain cool, and some of the greatest ones to ever to roll out of Detroit are the second-generation Chevy trucks like the ’70 Chevrolet K20 you see here.

These trucks were built to work hard all day long to get the job done while keeping everything simple. Then you look at the shape and lines of the body and you can’t help but notice the beauty of these old trucks, which are better looking than most new trucks. It’s easy to see why Jeff College built this classic Chevy instead of a run-of-the-mill Jeep to conquer the trails in Moab, Utah. 

Jeff built this truck purely from advice he read in magazines over the years, taking the guidance that he found in the pages of OFF-ROAD, Four Wheeler, and Petersen’s 4 Wheel & Off-Road. Like a lot of us, he knew nothing about off-roading before he started reading and learning from magazines. Now he’s a dirt veteran who’s out showing off in Moab wheeling the through tight and difficult trails proving that fullsizes dominate in a sea of Jeeps.

In a world of ugly, stressful SoCal commutes, Dave Perkins has it pretty sweet. “I live six miles from work,” he says. It’s obvious he’s stoked, but stops short of boasting. Dave works as a truck driver for a major motion picture studio. “One of my co-workers commutes all the way from Dana Point. It’s about sixty miles each way. The money is pretty good, so it’s worth it for him, but I’m glad I have a short commute.”

Even if he had a long haul to work, there’s little doubt Dave would still be stoked. His Cummins-powered 2002 Dodge 2500 4x4 is adept at a variety of tasks, including pavement duty. Bought new from the dealer lot, the 2500 is long paid off and has since been treated to a host of smart aftermarket upgrades that make it what it is today.

In the dirt, form follows function. Brian Binkert of Bink Designs purchased this 2005 F-150 Supercrew brand new, planning to use it as a daily driver. Desert duty wasn’t the truck’s primary role back then, so Brian installed a lowering kit along with a set of 22-inch Foose wheels. It was perfect for the pavement.

A pavement truck that stays on the pavement never has an identity crisis and rarely gets damaged. The trouble is that Brian’s business, Bink Designs, takes him to off-road events including desert races, short-course races, and informal gatherings in the dirt. As a slammed street cruiser, Bink’s F-1 was getting stuck or getting parked whenever dirt was involved. Something had to be done.

Even though his truck needed a re-do for the dirt, Brian had a working, driving vehicle: reliable transportation. Planning down time is tough, so it was somewhat serendipitous when he lost control in the rain and slammed the front into a brick wall. Down time—and a rebuild—had come a-knockin’!

Actor James Garner became famous in the ‘60s for portraying cowboy anti-hero Bret Maverick in the popular TV show Maverick. Later he solidified his spot in American culture by starring in the huge hit The Rockford Files.

Interestingly enough, a lot of people at the time never knew that James was not only a great actor but also a professional race car driver—and a pretty good one at that! Garner immersed himself in the motorhead lifestyle as both a driver and a race-team owner, and he realized some pretty good success in many of his race ventures.

During the mid ’60s, interest was growing for the sport of off-road racing, and Baja, Mexico, was the proving grounds for experimental cars, trucks, and their drivers who wanted to show their worth in this type of grueling event. Though conditions there were not suited for standard sedan-type autos, several trailblazers decided to run standard AMC “intermediates” through the rigors of Baja racing.

We all have some idea what we consider to be a budget ride. To some it’s a $100 dusty find embellished with duct tape and bailing wire. To others it might be slimming back to some tens of thousands of dollars. It all depends on your perspective, means, and desire to spend on some off-road rig. Here, we’ll throw out a batch of off-road vehicles we think can offer you some of the best bang for the buck.

Granted, each of these can be a moving target and things do change over time. When gas prices fluctuate to the high side, trucks with big motors tend to drop in price, meaning good deals can be had on great rigs with V-8 (and even V-10) engines. Conditions can also vary across the country. We see perfect metal examples of vehicles in the Southwest where it’s bright and sunny, but the interior parts may be UV rotted. In the Northeast, we see great interiors inside the rusting hulk of a body that’s seen too much winter salt.

Your choices may not agree with ours, and there may also be biases based on what area of the country you live in and the terrain on which you play. We’ve chosen some small and some larger rigs, and we offer you some of our reasons why.

It takes a lot of momentum (and a lot of cajones) to launch a big diesel truck. It’s not like a half-ton truck with a small-block V-8; there is a lot of weight wrapped up in a 3/4-ton package, and even more weight encompassed in the Cummins block of Carlos Calderon’s 2001 Dodge 4x4.

So what made this owner of Calderon Tire in Santa Maria, California—who has seen his fair share of repairs come out of the sand dunes and to his shop after bad mishaps—still fly his diesel Dodge like it had propellers on the front? Carlos blames it on his gender. Just because a guy knows it’s the wrong thing to do and that it could lead to disaster, there’s no guarantee it still won’t be done in the name of fun. And we’d back Carlos up in a second on that one.