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A Land Rover Adventure weekend in Moab will sharpen your behind-the-wheel skills — and throw in plenty of thrills. TBI’s automotive guru goes along for the ride

Story and Photography By Howard Walker

NO WAY. NOT IN a month of Sundays. Not in a million years. Not in a lifetime of leap years will that vehicle climb up that rock face. And certainly not with me inside it.

Welcome to Poison Spider Trail, in Moab, Utah, which right now is weaving its web up the perilous, near-vertical face of some massive red sandstone cliff.

“You really want us to go up that?” I inquire of our guide-cum-team-leader, Land Rover chief instructor Bob Burns. “Any chance we can, like, go around it?”

I blame it on my mechanical sympathy. Why would anyone want to subject an $80,000 ultra-luxe Range Rover HSE, with a paint finish you can see your reflection in, to such underbody-scraping and tire-slicing abuse? Not me.

But Burns is having none of it. He shows me how to program the Rover’s magical four-wheel-drive Terrain Response system, which gives the sport-ute the sure-footedness of a Patagonian mountain goat. He shows me how to select the low-ratio “crawler” gear. He tells me how not to scream.

So, ease the Range Rover’s nose up to the base of the cliff, grip tightly on the leather-trimmed wheel, and gently feed in the power.
As if by magic, the 5,600-pound behemoth starts to stair-walk up this wall-of-death incline, pulling like a pachyderm and not putting a Goodyear out of place.

With my heart beating as fast as the throaty 4.2-liter V-8 under the hood, I’m looking out of a windshield that’s completely filled with Windex-blue sky. All I see are the hands of one of the other instructors, pointing which direction I should turn the wheel. A finger to the right, go right just a tad. A finger to the left, easy to the left. Two clenched fists, stop now!

As we crest the peak, I have more adrenaline coursing through my veins than a finalist in American Idol. Burns looks across, breaks into a big grin and deadpans: “See, I told you, it’s the most fun you can have going two miles per hour.”

EXTREME LUXE

Sign up for one of the Land Rover Experience Adventure programs and you, too, can try your skills behind the wheel of a new Range Rover, Range Rover Sport or LR3 on some of North America’s most demanding trails.

It’s a pure adventure weekend. Arrive on Friday, drive all day Saturday and Sunday, fly home Monday. You don’t need to own a Land Rover vehicle to take part; you just need a spirit of adventure, a love of the great outdoors, and the urge to try something different.

But this being Land Rover, you also get pampered in the lap of luxury and style. Base camp for the weekend is the remarkable Sorrel River Ranch (sorrelriver.com), poised on the banks of the mighty Colorado River about 20 minutes from Moab. It’s Utah’s only AAA Four Diamond-rated resort and spa.

The views in every direction will steal your breath. Right across the river, the towering red rock buttes of Arches National Park. Behind you, in the distance, the snow-capped peaks of the La Sal mountains.

As part of the weekend, you can also try your hand at horseback riding — the resort was named after the sorrel quarter horses the previous owner’s wife used to raise — or maybe a little whitewater rafting. Or maybe mountain biking or hiking.

Me, I was happy as a clam sitting in the rocker with a glass of cold, crisp Chardonnay, watching the river roll by, anticipating the first night’s barbecue on the resort’s riverside patio.