Comment
Print
LEBANON - If you like the smell of gasoline, the taste of fried food, the sound of souped up trucks struggling through tons of mud and the feel of spongy, boggy earth under your boot, well, you’ll like Mudder’s Day in Lebanon.
So what makes a mudder?
“Best thing about it is abuse on vehicles,” said Steven Belanger of Prospect Hill Road in Lebanon. “You get to go out and beat on ‘em, it’s fun.”
Belanger, 17, and a Noble High junior, mostly takes his truck out mudding in a swamp behind his house, but today he was at the 4X4 Proving Ground’s annual Mudder’s Day event that, of course, always coincides with Mother’s Day.
Kurt and Brenda Zeller, who own Just Chevy Trucks on Route 202, run the event and a few other rallies behind their store during the summer months.
On Sunday mudding enthusiasts got to test their vehicles for the upcoming summer mudding campaign for an unlimited amount of runs through an eighth of a mile swath of mud to see how far they could get.
It takes the Zellers a couple of days with dozers and graders to get the mud the perfect consistency for a quality mudding experience. The cost was just $10 a person, which allowed mudders an unlimited number of runs.
Some 400 spectators were expected at Sunday’s show, which ran from 10 a.m. till about 5 p.m.
Scores of mud trucks and other custom vehicles revved up in a noisy, exhaust-filled queue as they waited their turn to try their best to coax their vehicles across the muddy mess.
When they didn’t succeed, a dozer would retrieve them to dryer ground using a chain that remains attached to the truck’s undercarriage.
Belanger said he was happy with his truck’s performance today, but might increase the axle size and get a bigger motor before the season begins in earnest.
All material on this site is copyright protected under penalty of federal law